The Ingoldsby Country by Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

Author:Charles G. (Charles George) Harper [Harper, Charles G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781373031068
Google: QtRYvgAACAAJ
Publisher: Creative Media Partners, LLC
Published: 2016-08-28T02:45:57+00:00

He was, it will be conceded, not even so near an approach to a poet as that mayor who read an address to Queen Elizabeth, beginning with,

"Most Gracious Queen,

Welcome to Folkesteen."

to which Her Majesty is said to have replied,

"You great fool,

Get off that stool!"

But doubtless these be all malicious inventions. Certainly, though, "great Eliza" did visit Folkestone, and we can have no doubt that the usual address was read—can even see and hear in imagination that mayor reading abysmal ineptitudes "um-um-er-er," like some blundering bumble-bee, the atmosphere growing thick and drowsy with falsities, platitudes, and infinite bombast, until that virginal but vinegary monarch cuts him rudely short. We can see—O! most clear-sighted that we are!—that tall and angular spinster, sharp-visaged, with high, beak-like nose, greatly resembling a gaunt hen—but a very game hen—actually cutting short that turbid flow of mayoral eloquence! we wonder she does not peck him.

Still hazardously up and down go those old streets and lanes of the old town—Beach Street, North Street, Fenchurch Street, Radnor Street, and East Street, whence you look out upon Copt Point and the serried tiers upon tiers of chalk cliffs stretching in the direction of Dover. Still the Martello tower stands upon that point, as it stands in the illustration of Folkestone by Turner, but the swarming population of to-day has blotted out much of that obvious romance that once burst full upon the visitor. The romance is still there, but you have to seek it and dig deep beneath the strata of modern changes before it is found. Trivial things dot the i's, cross the t's, and generally emphasise this triumph of convention. "Lanes" become "streets," and that quaintly illiterate old rendering, "Rendavowe" Street, was long since thought by no means worthy of more educated times, and accordingly changed to the correct spelling of "Rendezvous" it now bears.

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