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Updated: June 8, 2025
Also in jolly old fishwives, squatted under arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah! "That's an early Mozart, of course " "But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine.
It was true that he had more than kept his word that he had never broken a convention in his bearing towards her that in his rigid way he had behaved like a prince but she had been dirt under his feet she had been dirt under his feet! She wanted to rave like a fishwife though there were no fishwives in Mayfair. It was at this very moment of climax that a sudden memory beset her.
One always knows when the fishing-boats are arriving by the crowd that assembles on the quay; that peculiar population that seems natural to all ports, young, able-bodied sailors, full of interest about the run and the cargo old men in blue jerseys who sit on the wall, in the sun, all day, and recount their experiences various officials with gold bands on their caps, men with hand carts waiting to carry off the fish and fishwives their baskets strapped on their backs hoping for a haul of crabs and shrimps or fish from some of the small boats.
Throughout the day the babel of crowded tenement strife; the crying of fishwives and fagot-venders in the court; the striking of the hours; the boom of the time gun and sweet clamor of music bells; the failing of the light and the soaring note of the bugle he watched motionless beside his master. Very late at night shuffling footsteps came up the stairs.
A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just as the Maenads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights, dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what that institution was like.
He could not himself exactly have explained how his conception of the difference between the French and English Courts arose, but at seven years old, he in some way knew that King Louis was a finer gentleman than King Charles, that his Court was more elegant, and that the beauties who ruled it were not merry orange wenches, or romping card house-building maids of honour, or splendid viragoes who raved and stamped and poured forth oaths as fishwives do.
Foreign sailors in outlandish garments and of harsh-sounding, outlandish speech, stalwart fishwives with baskets of herrings on their heads, voluminous of petticoat above bare legs and bare feet, calling their wares shrilly and almost inarticulately, watermen in woollen caps and loose trousers rolled to the knees, peasants in goatskin coats, their wooden shoes clattering on the round kidney-stones, shipwrights and labourers from the dockyards, bellows-menders, rat-catchers, water-carriers, ink-sellers, and other itinerant pedlars.
She used to wring big boys by the ears; overawe fishwives with her voluble invective; put dangerous dogs to rout with sticks and stones, and evince, in all emergencies, an adventurous spirit and an alacrity for battle.
Thus old Edinburgh rises before us, beautiful and brave as she is no longer, yet thronged about the Netherbow Port, and up towards the Tron, the weighing-place and centre of city life, with fishwives and their stalls, with rough booths for the sale of rougher food, and with country lasses singing curds and whey, as they still did when Allan Ramsay nearly four hundred years after succeeded Dunbar as laureate of Edinburgh.
"That's right," said his trainer, inexorably. "It's just what you need. I had a long talk with Smithy, last night." "Buck," said the Doctor, clearing his throat, "have I ever ahem told you of the famous reply of Dr. Johnson to the Billingsgate fishwives?" "Johnson? Who? Fat, sandy-haired man lives on Third Street?" "No, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the well-known English author and character.
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