Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

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Various. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.1

REYNARD THE FOX.2

THE AMERICANS AND THE ABORIGINES

THE FALL OF ROME

ELINOR TRAVIS

THE PEOPLE.72

THE ROSE OF WARNING

GREEK FIRE AND GUNPOWDER.73

HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE AND LIVE IN IT

"ROGUES IN OUTLINE."

Birbone I

Birbone II

Birbone III

Birbone IV

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The natural history of the Cockney has been frequently illustrated, and never so successfully as in time past in the pages of Maga. But nature is inexhaustible in all her creations. You might study a lifetime, and yet not fully master the properties of one of those little Infusoria that wriggle or spin about in a phial of foul or fair water, and a still wider subject of study is of course supplied by any larger animal, such as a Cockney, placed as he is a little lower than the angels, and half-way down, or there abouts, between a man and a chimpanzee.

A Cockney is by locality very much what a tailor is by trade. Though a remote sub-multiple of a man, he is enterprising, indefatigable, cutting his way to his object through every thing with a ready tongue and a quick wit. Yet he is deficient in some qualities indispensable to the species homo. Courage the Cockney undoubtedly possesses, because he is always among those who are said to rush in where others fear to tread. But veneration is utterly wanting in his composition; and here the resemblance to the tailor is conspicuous; as we never knew a single snip that had the slightest reverence for any thing under heaven – if, indeed, the assertion should not be made in still broader terms. In the tailor this effect, defective, comes by an obvious cause. The intolerable liberties which the vulgar fraction is permitted to take with people's persons, divesting the best and bravest of us of the halo of heroism that surrounds us at a distance; and the fact that the great mysteries of dress, the paraphernalia of our dignity and decency, and the chief emblems of our manhood and domestic authority, emerge exclusively from the hands of this insignificant but indispensable maker of men, are enough to extinguish within him all sentiment of respect for any thing human or divine. The Cockney arrives at a similar state of easy and impudent non-chalance by a different process. Littered in London, and living there all his life, he is proud of its position among cites; and he comes, by a natural process of reasoning, to ascribe its importance to its connexion with his own person and people, and to see nothing better or greater in the universe than himself and what belongs to him. The feeling grows with his growth, and is fed by a full indulgence in all the good things with which the land of Cockayne abounds, and which the most morose of mortals must admit to be eminently conducive to self-complacency.

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The Frenchman had listened to these words more tranquilly than might have been expected, but with a slight twitching of his features, that showed they touched him to the quick. Suddenly he turned away.

"Is that your way of thinking?" said he. "You fancy you can get on better without Lafitte? I've no objection. If I had known it sooner, I would have spared myself the trouble of listening to your insolence, and you that of uttering it. Adieu! Monsieur Miko."

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