(1826) 'Keats was a Cockney, and Cockneys claimed him for their own.

The Seine, so much despised by Cockneys, is exactly the size to run through a magnificent street; palaces a mile long on one side, lofty Edinburgh stone (oh, the glorious antiques!)

Lamb refers here to the attacks of Blackwood's Magazine on the Cockneys, among whom he himself had been included.

For, though it was his whim to dine in his rooms alone, and though he had no fixed plans for the evening, Lanyard was too thoroughly cosmopolitan not to do in Cockaigne as the Cockneys do.

Two Cockneys stood by the gate, and one Observed, as they turned to go, "No wonder He likes that sort of thing, He's a Sphinx himself, you know.

And the Cockneys all admire.

Command Headquarters (who, of course, Ride us as Cockneys ride a horse I mean, without considering The animal; the ride's the thing)

Subsequent numbers of Blackwood contained other reviews of "The Cockney School of Poetry": Leigh Hunt, "the King of the Cockneys," was attacked in May, and in August it was the poet Keats who came under the critic's lash, four months after Croker's famous review of "Endymion" in the Quarterly.

Cockneys of Paris.

Cockneys of Paris.

In all public processions in the open air the crowd (or rather, as we might say, the Cockneys of Paris), in their anxiety to see everything that was to be seen, would frequently obstruct all the public avenues, and so prevent the procession from passing along.

There will be a dozen Cockneys writing battle songs, I'll warrant, who never saw a man shot in their lives, not even a hare.

Even after months of this sodden camp it was possible to find a youth to play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a velvet voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, ribald young cockneys in the front row blushed with embarrassment.

Of course the Cockneys, with their vasty houses and noise-ridden streets, can call us rustics if they choose, but for all that Fairfield is a better place to live in than London.

It was swarming with hill-people the day we were there, and strange was the contrast between the crowd inside the circle of picketed horses and the white-robed cockneys from Rabat who fill the market-place of Salé.

In this exquisite piece it will be observed, that Mr. Keats classes together WORDSWORTH, HUNT, and HAYDON, as the three greatest spirits of the age, and that he alludes to himself, and some others of the rising brood of Cockneys, as likely to attain hereafter an equally honourable elevation.

It is amusing to see what a hand the two Cockneys make of this mythology; the one confesses that he never read the Greek Tragedians, and the other knows Homer only from Chapman, and both of them write about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education.

It is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of any thing like anger or personal spleen.

He was an ex-soldier, of course: one of those under-sized Cockneys with the Whitechapel pallor overlying a pugnacious instinct, who make such astonishing fighting-men in the intervals between sulking and a sort of half-affectionate abuse of everything in sight.

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES A writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post is very angry indeed with my performances in this column.

The curved pier painted pea green and covered with Cockneys, now was disclosed to our eyes, and my old friend from Leicester was again staggered into a profound silence, by being told that a row of houses with a windmill at the end of it, was Buenos Ayres.

The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a Beggars Opera or a Rape of the Lock.

These papers were full of a profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys.

Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance, these cockneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to God for mercy in all this hell.

GOTHAMITES, American cockneys, New York being called Gotham.