Sometimes he would give the coppers wrapped up in old ballads telling of murders and hangings, shipwrecks, battles, national events, some in print, some in writing, all dirty. In this way René became possessed of an ode to the Albert Memorial:
Proud monument, thou Christmas cake in stone!
The thing thou meanest never yet has grown
In English soil, a virtue not content
To be its own reward, a virtue bent
On cheating life of man and man of life.
We English have rejoicèd in the strife
Of being, till that virtue chilled our blood
And had us hypnotized and nipped in bud
Our aspiration. We of Shakespeare’s line