DOI Heft:
August 23, 1884
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.17757#0092
August 23, 1884.]
PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.
85
SEA-SI DE SPOTS.
(,Spotted by Dumb-Crambo Junior.)
Weston-super-Mare.
ll'lllMf1' I1
Broad-states.
“ THE SONG OF THE DIRT.”
(Covent Garden Market, August, 1884.)
With boots all dirty and worn,
And trousers heavy with mud,
A Londoner trudged on a market day
With a footfall’s dreary thud—
Splash, splash, splash!
While cabbage-leaves spatter and spirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
He sang “ The Song of the Dirt'1
Splash, splash, splash!
From morn to even-time,
Splash, splash, splash!
Through garbage, tilth and grime.
Stenches strong in the street,
Streets with stenches strong,
As over the Hags I gingerly creep,
I wonder to whom they belong.
Oh ! but to breathe the breath
Of the man far away in the rear,
But I’m forced to hold my nose,
For I must with such odours near.
Oh ! but for one short hour
An appetite good to feel!
I formerly used my dinner to want,
But a walk now costs a meal.
With boots all dirty and worn,
And trousers heavy with mud,
A Londoner trudged on a market-day
With a footfall’s dreary thud.
Splash, splash, splash!
While garbage may spatter and spirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch—
Would that its cry could reach the rich—
He sang “ The Song of the Dirt."
A “ Sound " Argument.—The past Session, though rather barren,
can hardly be said to have been entirely fruitless, seeing that it
produced so many pairs {'pears) and a couple of Queen's Speeches
(Queen's peaches).
ON ALL LOURS CLAVIGERA;
OK, EIGHT AT LAST.
It may be remembered that Professor Buskin during the Spring
addressed a letter to a provincial paper, respecting the projected
new railway for Derbyshire. As he therein expressed some very
strong opinions against the scheme, as one likely to give the miser-
able, melancholy, and toiling millions who dwell in smoke-stilling
and unwholesome towns, an occasional chance of letting a little
bright fresh air and sunlight in upon the gloom of their darkened
lives, it is satisfactory to know that the letter in question is now
believed to have been a clever hoax. At any rate, the zenith of that
boon to millions, the summer excursion season has produced a second
communication to the same journal: and, as it not only bears
the Professor’s signature, but breathes with the spirit of his larger
philanthropy, there can be little doubt as to its authenticity.
In the course of this second letter, Professor Buskin says :—
“ I do not know how this mental revolution has come about within
me, nor, were you to ask me, could I tell you. I only recognise the
stupendous fact that I feel, and am not ashamed to avow, that I no
longer regard the wild witchery of the Derbyshire glens as a precious
and special property held by Providence in trust for me and. a few
exclusive well-to-do Sybarites for our sole select and selfish delecta-
tion. It may be that I have learnt the lesson of a larger-hearted
humanity in the dusty pit-entrances of Metropolitan Theatres—that
the significant doom of Paw Clawdian the self-seeker (whose eventful
career I watched while he was with us in London, and whom 1 intend to
follow in his no doubt equally eventful career in the Provinces) sent a
white-feathered diamond-tipped barb of reproach straight to the gold
of my inner consciousness, and set me saying to myself, ‘ Buskin,
Buskin, would you, like that selfish voluptuary, keep the world’s
sweetness and beauty entirely for yourself? Think of the Earth-
quake and the four-poster, and see whether, to your dull brains, they
teach no higher philosophy than that of admission by voucher.’
“Enough said about my theatrical experiences. I now—and I
hope, after this candour, now without suspicion—take up that of the
public—public in its widest sense, including the Birmingham and
Manchester tripper choked in all finer utterance with the soot of his
alleys, and broken in spirit with their barren blackness. And how,
my Sybarite friend, think you this same soul-sunken tripper of ours
is to get a taste of this little priceless bit of mid-England glory
without a railway-ticket, and the line wherewithal it is available for
the return journey ? Here it is, this Derbyshire Garden of Eden,
with its magic-lantern-slide effects, lost for ever and for ever to
everyone save to you and to me and the lucky Stall-sitters who hold,
out of the overflowing fulness of their purses, the front places in the
world’s glittering show, to the shifting and shutting out of the
humbler and poorer from the sight and sense of it! And the shame
of it! A leaden mist from Erebus might have eternally settled on
those fairy glens, and none have been the wiser.
“ On its miniature cliff s a dark ivy leaf may have detached itself as
an object of importance ; you may have distinguished with interest
the species of mosses on the top ; you may have counted like many
falling diam onds the magical drops of its petrifying well; the cluster
of violets in the shade may appear like an Armida’s garden to you.
(Nay, even the water-rats in the stream may have lifted up their heads
and asked you conundrums, and you possibly may have been no
more surprised than if you had taken a Venetian siesta after a good
lobster luncheon. But where is all the use and the grace of it? Is
it only for you and for me, my friend, and for no one else ?
“ Follow, if you can, without wetted feet, the floretted banks
and foam-crisped wavelets of the slyly wilful stream. Into the
very heart and depth of this, and politely bending with the
bends of it, your railway introduces its close-clinging attention.
The rocks are not big enough to be tunnelled, they are cheerily
blasted away ; the brook is not wide enough to be bridged, it is com-
fortably covered in, and is thenceforward no physical obstacle to an
enterprising Iiailway Company. I have not said, I leave the cler-
gyman and physician to say, what moral and sanitary changes
follow a free access to the gifts of Nature. But I may, at least,
advise your correspondent that envenomed air is deadlier to the
young than the old, and that the sooner a completed line of railway
enables the pent-up thousands of pestiferous cities to figure as
three-and-sixpenny excursionists, if only for a few hours, amidst
these hitherto inaccessible fairy haunts, the sooner will English
children who have been reared in mephitic fume instead of mountain
breeze, who have had for playground heaps of ashes instead of banks
of flowers, whose Christmas holidays brought them no memory,
whose Easter sun no hope, enjoy some of the blessed delight
of breezy hill-side and sunlit glen hitherto claimed as the special
and peculiar heirloom of that unreasoning and wrongheaded class
who, singing the swmet song of Nature’s praise, defame that priceless
metal line which, like some mighty wizard, alone has borne their
welcome echo to a myriad aching city hearts.”
PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.
85
SEA-SI DE SPOTS.
(,Spotted by Dumb-Crambo Junior.)
Weston-super-Mare.
ll'lllMf1' I1
Broad-states.
“ THE SONG OF THE DIRT.”
(Covent Garden Market, August, 1884.)
With boots all dirty and worn,
And trousers heavy with mud,
A Londoner trudged on a market day
With a footfall’s dreary thud—
Splash, splash, splash!
While cabbage-leaves spatter and spirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
He sang “ The Song of the Dirt'1
Splash, splash, splash!
From morn to even-time,
Splash, splash, splash!
Through garbage, tilth and grime.
Stenches strong in the street,
Streets with stenches strong,
As over the Hags I gingerly creep,
I wonder to whom they belong.
Oh ! but to breathe the breath
Of the man far away in the rear,
But I’m forced to hold my nose,
For I must with such odours near.
Oh ! but for one short hour
An appetite good to feel!
I formerly used my dinner to want,
But a walk now costs a meal.
With boots all dirty and worn,
And trousers heavy with mud,
A Londoner trudged on a market-day
With a footfall’s dreary thud.
Splash, splash, splash!
While garbage may spatter and spirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch—
Would that its cry could reach the rich—
He sang “ The Song of the Dirt."
A “ Sound " Argument.—The past Session, though rather barren,
can hardly be said to have been entirely fruitless, seeing that it
produced so many pairs {'pears) and a couple of Queen's Speeches
(Queen's peaches).
ON ALL LOURS CLAVIGERA;
OK, EIGHT AT LAST.
It may be remembered that Professor Buskin during the Spring
addressed a letter to a provincial paper, respecting the projected
new railway for Derbyshire. As he therein expressed some very
strong opinions against the scheme, as one likely to give the miser-
able, melancholy, and toiling millions who dwell in smoke-stilling
and unwholesome towns, an occasional chance of letting a little
bright fresh air and sunlight in upon the gloom of their darkened
lives, it is satisfactory to know that the letter in question is now
believed to have been a clever hoax. At any rate, the zenith of that
boon to millions, the summer excursion season has produced a second
communication to the same journal: and, as it not only bears
the Professor’s signature, but breathes with the spirit of his larger
philanthropy, there can be little doubt as to its authenticity.
In the course of this second letter, Professor Buskin says :—
“ I do not know how this mental revolution has come about within
me, nor, were you to ask me, could I tell you. I only recognise the
stupendous fact that I feel, and am not ashamed to avow, that I no
longer regard the wild witchery of the Derbyshire glens as a precious
and special property held by Providence in trust for me and. a few
exclusive well-to-do Sybarites for our sole select and selfish delecta-
tion. It may be that I have learnt the lesson of a larger-hearted
humanity in the dusty pit-entrances of Metropolitan Theatres—that
the significant doom of Paw Clawdian the self-seeker (whose eventful
career I watched while he was with us in London, and whom 1 intend to
follow in his no doubt equally eventful career in the Provinces) sent a
white-feathered diamond-tipped barb of reproach straight to the gold
of my inner consciousness, and set me saying to myself, ‘ Buskin,
Buskin, would you, like that selfish voluptuary, keep the world’s
sweetness and beauty entirely for yourself? Think of the Earth-
quake and the four-poster, and see whether, to your dull brains, they
teach no higher philosophy than that of admission by voucher.’
“Enough said about my theatrical experiences. I now—and I
hope, after this candour, now without suspicion—take up that of the
public—public in its widest sense, including the Birmingham and
Manchester tripper choked in all finer utterance with the soot of his
alleys, and broken in spirit with their barren blackness. And how,
my Sybarite friend, think you this same soul-sunken tripper of ours
is to get a taste of this little priceless bit of mid-England glory
without a railway-ticket, and the line wherewithal it is available for
the return journey ? Here it is, this Derbyshire Garden of Eden,
with its magic-lantern-slide effects, lost for ever and for ever to
everyone save to you and to me and the lucky Stall-sitters who hold,
out of the overflowing fulness of their purses, the front places in the
world’s glittering show, to the shifting and shutting out of the
humbler and poorer from the sight and sense of it! And the shame
of it! A leaden mist from Erebus might have eternally settled on
those fairy glens, and none have been the wiser.
“ On its miniature cliff s a dark ivy leaf may have detached itself as
an object of importance ; you may have distinguished with interest
the species of mosses on the top ; you may have counted like many
falling diam onds the magical drops of its petrifying well; the cluster
of violets in the shade may appear like an Armida’s garden to you.
(Nay, even the water-rats in the stream may have lifted up their heads
and asked you conundrums, and you possibly may have been no
more surprised than if you had taken a Venetian siesta after a good
lobster luncheon. But where is all the use and the grace of it? Is
it only for you and for me, my friend, and for no one else ?
“ Follow, if you can, without wetted feet, the floretted banks
and foam-crisped wavelets of the slyly wilful stream. Into the
very heart and depth of this, and politely bending with the
bends of it, your railway introduces its close-clinging attention.
The rocks are not big enough to be tunnelled, they are cheerily
blasted away ; the brook is not wide enough to be bridged, it is com-
fortably covered in, and is thenceforward no physical obstacle to an
enterprising Iiailway Company. I have not said, I leave the cler-
gyman and physician to say, what moral and sanitary changes
follow a free access to the gifts of Nature. But I may, at least,
advise your correspondent that envenomed air is deadlier to the
young than the old, and that the sooner a completed line of railway
enables the pent-up thousands of pestiferous cities to figure as
three-and-sixpenny excursionists, if only for a few hours, amidst
these hitherto inaccessible fairy haunts, the sooner will English
children who have been reared in mephitic fume instead of mountain
breeze, who have had for playground heaps of ashes instead of banks
of flowers, whose Christmas holidays brought them no memory,
whose Easter sun no hope, enjoy some of the blessed delight
of breezy hill-side and sunlit glen hitherto claimed as the special
and peculiar heirloom of that unreasoning and wrongheaded class
who, singing the swmet song of Nature’s praise, defame that priceless
metal line which, like some mighty wizard, alone has borne their
welcome echo to a myriad aching city hearts.”