A lady stood within a busy city,
Her darling little daughter by her side;
She'd stopped to buy a bunch of pretty violets
From a ragged little orphan she espied.
The words she spoke were kinder than the boy had heard for years;
And in reply to what she asked, he murmur'd through his tears,
Everybody's loved by some one, everybody knows that's true,
Some have father and mother dear; sister and brother, too.
All the time that I remember, since I was a mite so small,
I seem to be the only one that nobody loves at all.
With this enchanting song the English welkin resounds by day and night. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, full of four-ale and bad whisky, howls it in chorus at his favourite "public," work-girls sing it in factories, mothers rock their children to sleep with it, and every English urchin whistles or shouts it at you with unflagging zest. Of course, there are others; for example, there is I'm a P'liceman, which goes like this:
In the inky hour of midnight, when the clock is striking three,
As I stroll along my beet-root, many curious things I see:
Ragged urchins stagger past me to their mansions in the west;
Millionaires, through cold and hunger, on our doorsteps sink to rest;
Dirty dustmen in their broughams, off to supper at the "Cri.";
Then "Bill Sykes," the burglar, passes, with an eye-glass in his eye.
Such are the sights I witness when I am on my beat,
Filling my heart with sawdust, filling my boots with feet;
Covering half the pavement up with my "plates of meat,"
Though mother sent to say that I'm a p'liceman—
which—need one remark?—is intended for what the Scots are supposed to call "wut." Also, there is He Stopped:
Pendlebury Plum had a wart on his gum,
And he rubbed it with sand-paper hard;
The wart on his gum made Plum fairly hum,
When it stuck out about half a yard.
The wart grew so quick, when he rubbed it with a brick,
Till it looked like a short billiard-cue;
Said Plum to himself, "I shall die on the shelf,
For I'm darned if I know what to do."
So he went and got a pick-axe and shov'd it underneath,
Then he lifted up his jaw, and he swallowed all his teeth;
Then he stopped!
The verses I have quoted are a good, true, and fair sample of the kind of thing that finds favour among the English masses. I do not think that anything better is being proffered, and it is pretty certain that anything less inane would be doomed to failure. The fact is that the English mind in the lump is flat, coarse, and maggoty, and the English understanding is as the understanding of a feeble and ill-bred child. A couple of generations ago the songs popular among Englishmen had some claim to coherence, decency, and common sense; nowadays, however, the Englishman admits that "he cannot sing the old songs." He has gone farther and fared worse, and among the many symptoms of his decadence, none is more pronounced than his easy toleration of the balderdash that is being served up to him by the "'alls."