But at Yarmouth, their feet are, as it were, upon their own wicket; their deportment was to the manner born.
See them shying at skittles or cocoanuts, gorging on stout and shellfish, bustling, breathless but roaring, from "entertainment" to "entertainment." How hot they look! how they perspire! and how they shout! Do they really amuse themselves? I wonder.
They all seek happiness, these good brothers and sisters of ours; but surely they run away from it that so distress themselves in its pursuit. To "get on," to "do" the utmost possible in the shortest possible time, to eclipse their fellows, to make haste and yet more haste, and ever more haste—that, in pleasure as in toil, is ever their aim.
For a right-down, regular, blaring, flaring, glaring, tearing, staring, devil-may-caring hullabaloo, Blackpool on August Bank Holiday is peculiar.
But between the Lancashire and the Cockney-tripper there is an essential difference which is not in the Southerner's favour.
The Northern tripper may be rowdy, but there is a redeeming quality of broad joviality, good-tempered companionship in his razzling, that mellows and softens its asperity. But the Cockney-tripper, from his exasperating accent to his infuriating concertina, is aggressively, blatantly, harshly coarse. There is a self-sufficient "cockiness" about him that soars above all compromise and defers to nothing and to nobody. His profanity is more raucous and vicious than the Northerner's, his ebriety more ribald, brutal, and swinish. Armed with his customary concertina, or his still more harrowing occasional cornet, 'Arry is a terror to shudder at.
His 'Arriet, too, is infinitely coarser than the worst specimen of the Lancashire mill-girl.
The shrieking sisterhood of the flaunting feathers and marvellously beaded and bugled tippets, swagger along in serried bands, five and six feet deep. Arm in arm they come, lifting their skirts high in impudent dance as they lurch to and fro, giggling hysterically, and shouting vocal inanities with shrill and piercing insistence.
There is nothing more distressing in all England than the spectacle of these unfortunate persons in their hours of mirth. In all England there is no poverty more pitiful than the conspicuous poverty of their resources of pleasure.