ells have knolled to church,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
Or know what 'tis to pity and be pitied.

There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the
circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the
one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city.
"If ever been where bells have knolled to church"; if you have ever been
within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty
enough to call yourself a Cockney.

We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens
is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon
the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no
more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be
served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it
would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of
civilisation. And we should (I hope) all favour the spreading of the
town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation. The objection to the
spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that
such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could
ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would
have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a
dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the
common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine
pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he
was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the
side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen
means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that
he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous
weakness, was that he was a man of one city.

For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as
Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no
man's travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial
than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts;
he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of
whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is,
as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendours of
Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at
home he had