"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cab-driver hurried on. With all the skilled experience of a thorough cockney charioteer he tried to conquer time and space by his rare knowledge of short cuts and fine acquaintance with unknown thoroughfares. He seemed to avoid every street which was the customary passage of mankind. The houses, the population, the costume, the manners, the language through which they ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... bloomin', stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies. "There ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... fisherman's rugged life was spent on the restless ocean. Two months at sea and eight days ashore was the unvarying routine of Jim's life, summer and winter, all the year round. That is to say, about fifty days on shore out of the year, and three hundred and fifteen days on what the cockney greengrocer living next door to Jim ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... away, ... into all that arid civilization, 'laurel-clumps and invisible visible fences,' as you say!—and the grand, eternal smoke rising up in the distance, with its witness against nature! People grew severely in jest about cockney landscape—but is it not true that the trees and grass in the close neighbourhood of great cities must of necessity excite deeper emotion than the woods and valleys will, a hundred miles off, where human ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Plaanden tottered in his saddle, but quickly recovered. Instantly Perkins was up again, the blood streaming from the side of his head. He was conscious of brown hands clutching at the cricketer, to drag him away. He himself seized the cockney's legs and braced for that absurd and deadly tug of war. Then Von Plaanden's saber descended, and he was able to ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred in ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... of those who, on all such occasions, "died hard." He was the last man in the ship who ever gave up a prejudice; and this for three several reasons: he was a cockney, and believed himself born in the centre of human knowledge; he was a seaman, and understood the world; he was a boatswain, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and cheer after cheer rung from thousands of throats. As the General drove to Government House, he was greeted by cries of "Avenge Majuba!" and "Bravo, General!" and by the amount of emotion expended and the universal expression of relief evidenced, it was plain that the Cape colonists, like the cockney Londoner, were prepared "to bet their bottom dollar" on the combination of Sir Redvers Buller and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... "One of our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised on ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... are supported horizontally on the branches of the trees, and a third planted perpendicularly in the ground. These cimeaux are intended as a sort of treacherous invitation to the birds to come and rest themselves. So regularly as Sunday morning arrives, the Marseillais Cockney installs himself in his pit, arranges a loophole through which he can see what passes outside, and waits with all imaginable patience. The question that will naturally be asked, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Cap'n Pigg a nasty twinge. He had always prided himself on his seaman-like ways, and to proceed thus, down the great river, like a mountebank, or a Cockney out on a Bank Holiday, hurt his feelings more ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... South Seas and them islands was full of queer happenings, anyhow. Said that Eri's yarn reminded him of one that Jule Sparrow used to tell. There was a Cockney in that yarn, too, and a South Sea woman and a schooner. But in other respects ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that in everything that was external, except her beauty, she fell short of a fastidious taste. She was intensely ignorant even for that time. She spoke in a broad Cockney dialect. She had lived the life of the Coal Yard, and, like Zola's Nana, she could never remember the time when she had known the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... turn on the steam heat in November. On rainy days you are exercised in a glass-roofed tanbark ring, and hour after hour you are handled over deep straw to improve your action. You breathe outdoor air only in high-fenced grass paddocks around which you are driven in surcingle rig by a Cockney groom imported with the pigskin saddles and British condition powders. From the day your name is written in the stud-book until you leave, you have balanced feed, all-wool blankets, fly-nettings, and coddling that never ceases. Yet this is the method ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... at the expense of the commune. To an Englishman the spot could not be otherwise than strangely interesting. I imagined my own language being spoken there five or six centuries ago, and speculated as to whether the accent was Cockney or Lancashire, or ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... come, then," she said, shortly. "You don't look like a Cockney. I guess you're a gentleman, aren't you—run away from home ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... the same floor with Henry turned out to drink at his expense, and left off work for a good hour. With some exceptions they were a rough lot, and showed little friendliness or good-humor over it. One even threw out a hint that no cockney forges were wanted in Hillsborough. But another took him up, and said, "Maybe not; but you are not much of a man to drink his liquor ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... faculties, which delight in gardens, may therein encounter something for their owne advantage. The modell, which I perceive you have seene, will aboundantly testifie my abhorrency of those painted and formal projections of our cockney gardens and plotts, which appeare like gardens of past-board and marchpane, and smell more of paynt then of flowers and verdure; our drift is a noble, princely, and universal Elysium, capable of all the amoenities that can naturally be introduced into gardens of pleasure, and such as may stand in ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... last she did not say audibly. The cockney rubber was fondling the mare's muzzle and he did not hear Betty's comment. The discovery of this second Ida ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... many of the non-essentials, yet, perhaps, enough of variance is observed to make it noticeable and altogether piquant to the wide-awake Yankee, who, in turn, balances the Western "reckoning" by his unique "kalkilations." But neither are as absurd as the Cockney, who gets off his ridiculous nonsense, as, for example, the following: "Ho Lord, help us to take hold of the horns of the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... to the 'Times' is the ultimate remedy for all the evils to which flesh is heir. Dickens's early novels, said Fitzjames, represented an avatar of 'chaff'; and gave with unsurpassable vivacity the genuine fun of a thoroughbred cockney typified by Sam Weller. Sam Weller is delightful in his place; but he is simply impertinent when he fancies that his shrewd mother wit entitles him to speak with authority upon great questions of constitutional ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... But what we got out of that pie-faced Nimms of Penrhyn's wasn't worth taking notes of. He's got a map about as full of expression as the south side of a squash, Nimms. A peanut-headed Cockney that Penrhyn found somewhere ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... servants, of one description or other, was kept; waiters, chambermaids, grooms, postillions, shoe-blacks, cooks, scullions, and what not, for there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no accent is so melodious as the cockney. Jacks creaked in the kitchens turning round spits, on which large joints of meat piped and smoked before great big fires. There was running up and down stairs, and along galleries, slamming of ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... parks, and elegant casinos. With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined air ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... —consequently know as little news as if I had been shut up in Bungey castle. Rumours there are of great bickerings and uneasiness; but I don't believe there will be any bloodshed of places, except Legge's, which nobody seems willing to take-I mean as a sinecure. His Majesty of Cockney is returned exceedingly well, but grown a little out of humour at finding that we are not so much pleased with all the Russians and Hessians that he has hired to recover the Ohio. We are an ungrateful people! Make a great ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else's work, which they would not do if they themselves could help it. The little energy and eagerness that crop up show themselves in cockney cupidity and business "push." Even the policemen and the chapels are not infrequent enough to break the monotony. The sun is shining cheerfully; there is no fog; and though the smoke effectually prevents anything, whether faces and hands or bricks and mortar, from looking fresh and clean, it is ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... this account alone, I have often been ashamed, that we, Americans, descended mostly from them. When a man is ill used, it invites others to insult him. One of our prisoners, who had been treated with a drink of grog, took out his knife, and, as the cockney's face was turned the other way, cut off one skirt of his long coat. This excited peals of laughter. When the poor Londoner saw that this was done by a roguish American, at the instigation of his own countrymen, the tear stood in his eye. Even our jolly, big bellied captain, enjoyed the ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... ye monarchs, hearken To your instructor. Juan now was borne, Just as the day began to wane and darken, O'er the high hill, which looks with pride or scorn Toward the great city.—Ye who have a spark in Your veins of Cockney spirit, smile or mourn According as you take things well or ill;— Bold Britons, we are ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... drivers in difficulties with their steeds; the continuous cry of "Keep to the right!" from the military police; from a garden close by, the howl of an abandoned dog; and from some dilapidated house Cockney voices harmonising: "It's a Long, Long Trail." There would be no moon that night, and a moaning wind ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... rules of the game; the automatic movements come all right, but in a clinch you've got to fight like a cat with tooth and claw, use your boots, your knee, or anything that comes handy. Perhaps that's why your lithe little Cockney is such a useful man with the bayonet. Now the Hun is a hefty beggar, and he isn't hampered by any ideas of playing the game, but he's as mechanical as a vacuum brake, and he's no good ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... French, but he had learned to speak English in Jamaica. Thus his accent was a curious mixture of French and Cockney, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Country. Well, and so Stella Clackmannan and I, in the hostel we run for poor dears who've lost their situations abroad and have no friends to go to on coming back here, found among our guests a bright little Cockney who's been what she calls an up-and-down girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang, the capital of Rowdydaria. My dearest, the things that girl has climbed over and crawled under, and the weather she's come through, in escaping from the Rowdydarians and getting back here! And the things she's seen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... owner of the Cockney voice, rising to his feet and revealing himself a small man with large head and thin wizened features, "Mr. Chairman, I rise to protest right 'ere an' naow against the presence of (h)any representative of ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... on shore. The person I addressed was a tall young man, with a fustian frock coat. He had a long face, long nose, and wide mouth, with large restless eyes. There was a grin on his countenance which seemed permanent, and had it not been for his bronzed complexion, I should have declared him to be a cockney, and nothing else. He was, however, no such thing, but what is called a rock lizard, that is, a person born at Gibraltar of English parents. Upon hearing my question, which was in Spanish, he grinned more than ever, and inquired, in a strange accent, whether I was a son of Gibraltar. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the centre of activity. London is the nucleus of England; not only the seat of government, but the focus of intellect, of art, of culture, of all that makes life worth living; and please do not put me down as a cockney, Miss Lambert, if I confess that I love these crowded streets. I am a lawyer, you know, and human ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... off in constrained silence. The captain ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and went on deck to relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney with a wizened countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small change of his attempts to engage the passenger in conversation on topics that he considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth snubbing he rose in dudgeon, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and "preciosity," of which the new book was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth's most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the "Cockney School" clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he DID repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... painting as in poetry, all the new movements of value are escapes from professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because they seem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work of Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it was cockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected. Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; and they are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back. They think he is merely shirking difficulties. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... beautiful, the great ship in the sunshine!" The old woman, who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in this memory of the ship at the Nore—why, Heaven knows!—and her voice broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told of was a new experience ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered. Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened, still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the house, he might have listened to patter from the other side of the footlights. It ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... charming little Cockney accent). Yes, Grandma, it's me—little ELFIE, come all the way from Australia to see you, because I thought you must be sow lownly all by yourself! My Papa often told me what a long score he owed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... long distance—he fancied. He felt as one who, taken by a trance, is bereft of power though not of knowledge. The staring silence was as the silence of a tomb, whose walls were full of eyes, intent and fatigued. He started when a person in uniform, hitherto apparently waxen, said in a cockney voice, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Evening Post is very angry indeed with my performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, "Mr. G. K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist." I do not mind his saying that I am not a humourist—in which (to tell the truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am not a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French writer said of me, "He is ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... of modern scholarship, and to urge his own fanciful or shallow theories. He treats all human superstitions and mythologies as if he were standing in the Strand and judging them by the ideas of modern London. His is a Cockney's view of antiquity. He cannot imagine that a barbarous and infant people, groping in the mysteries of the moral universe, might entertain some earnest and poetic views which were not precisely in the line of thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... "Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... each other, the poet recumbent upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs and Cockney poets by Christopher ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... supposed, and is intelligible after some practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips—Namby Pamby Philips—whom Thackeray calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar" as his model, in the introduction to his insipid "Pastorals," 1709. Steele, in No. 540 of the Spectator (November 19, 1712), printed some mildly commendatory ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... quite uninterested in what they were doing, they again began speaking to one another, or rather one of them, a hard-bitten, shrewd-looking man, much the older of the two, began talking in what was, though Timmy was not aware of it, a Cockney dialect. ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... when I reached them, and harder than ever to locate; but it also meant that I might float right over the worst of them if I hit off a lucky place.' Davies thumped the table in disgust. 'Pah! It makes me sick to think of having to trust to an accident like that, like a lubberly cockney out for a boozy Bank Holiday sail. Well, just as I foresaw, the wall of surf appeared clean across the horizon, and curling back to shut me in, booming like thunder. When I last saw the Medusa she seemed to be charging it like a horse at a fence, and I took a rough bearing of her position by ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... months' job of driving a British ambulance on the war front in Belgium brings this back straight from the trenches: "One cold morning a sign was pushed up above the German trench facing ours, only about fifty yards away, which bore in large letters the words: 'Got mit Uns!' One of our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised on a stick. It read: ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... simply for our service, assuredly bountiful Nature left them in ignorance of the fact. And it is to the sportsman and the colt-breaker that we must apply, if we wish to know whose victims are the most willing. Not to the cockney casuist, whose knowledge of the stag is confined to his venison, and who never trusts himself on the horse till it has been "long trained, in shackles, to procession pace." If he did, he would find that the unfettered ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... over-dressed, showy individual a shade more of a cockney than himself, interposed ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her bare hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she very nearly stepped against a little cockney. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... "The Disappointed Dinner Party." R.W. Buss. A scene of cockney mortification humorously treated.—An unlucky Londoner and his tawdrily-dressed wife, appeared to have toiled up the hill, with their family of four children, to a friend's cottage, the door of which is opened by an old housekeeper, with "Master's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... as good fun as a cynic could ask, To see how this cockney-bred setter of rabbits Takes gravely the lord of the forest to task, And judges ...
— English Satires • Various
... of citizens on their Sunday walks, who would ascend to the top of the tower and amuse themselves with reconnoitering the city through a telescope. Not far from this tower were the gardens of the White Conduit House, a Cockney Elysium, where Goldsmith used to figure in the humbler days of his fortune. In the first edition of his Essays he speaks of a stroll in these gardens, where he at that time, no doubt, thought himself in perfectly genteel society. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... But cockney praise is ebbing fast, And Sappho's lute has lost its power, And surely my career is past Like ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... dissimilar from the enterprising traders of the eastern coast; republicanism is not always democracy, and democracy is not always locofocoism; a gentleman is not always a loafer, although certainly a loafer is never a gentleman. A cockney, who never went beyond Margate, or a sea-sick trip to Boulogne, that paradise of prodigals, always fancies that all Americans are Yankees, all clock-makers, all spitters, all below his level. He never sees or converses with American gentlemen, and his inferences ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... heard the first dismal warning. For some reason or other I had to go down into the basement of the school. The janitor, a highly efficient but exceedingly bad-humoured cockney, who was dissatisfied with all things Canadian because "in the old country we do things differently"—whose sharp tongue was feared by many, and who once remarked to a lady teacher in the most casual way, "If you was a lidy, I'd wipe ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... subordinates. The smaller faults and the mannerisms of the actor did not trouble him, provided the main thought and feeling were there. He would merely laugh at a suggestion to straighten out the legs and walk, to lengthen the drawl, or to heighten the cockney accent of a prominent member ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... beryl, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, emerald .... Thou was upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire." We would point out these radiant avenues of return; but sometimes we feel in our hearts that we sound but cockney choices, as guides amid the ancient temples, the cyclopean crypts sanctified by the mysteries. To be intelligible we replace the opalescent shining by the terms of the anatomist, and we speak of the pineal gland and the pituitary body in the same breath with the Most High. Yet when ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning. Charlotte ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... play dominoes. "If it'll do you any good to know it," she said finally, "it's Susie Capper, commonly called 'Tootles.' And I tell you what it is. If you come snooping round my place to get me before the beak, I'll scream and kick, so help me Bob, I will." There was an English cockney twang ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Pickwick. The impersonation of the shrewdness, quaint humor, and best qualities of cockney low life.—C. Dickens, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... houses deserted, with doors and windows boarded; several of the churches made over into barracks, or riding-schools; the market closed; the State House filled with lounging officers; and the streets thronged, even at this early hour, by a varied uniformed soldiery, speaking Cockney English, the jargon of the counties, Scottish Gaelic, or guttural German, as they elbowed their passage, the many scarlet jackets interspersed with the blue of artillery and cavalry, the Hessian red and yellow, the green of the rifle-corps, or the kilts ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... with the red neon glare. Another ship, from China, dropped slowly to its stage near by, and the unloaders swarmed about the pneumatic tubes to receive the mail. The teleradio was shouting news of a failure of the Manchurian wheat crop. Nat's chief officer, a short cockney named Brent, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... to converse with me with the freedom of a friend; and very pleasant it was to hear pretty thoughts expressed in pretty language, and from pretty lips. I could perceive that she thought me a little rustic and provincial; but I had not been all the way to Canton to be brow-beaten by a cockney girl, however clever and handsome. On the whole—and I say it without vanity, at this late day—I think the impression left behind me, among these good people, was favourable. Perhaps Clawbonny was not without its influence; but, when ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... think after this series of inexplicable events? Carefinotu speaking English like a cockney, calling him by his name, announcing the early arrival of Uncle Will, and then the sudden ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... the judgment of the cockney who buttered his horse's hay, the ragged boy skinned her mice and plucked her sparrows in my absence. The consequence was her untimely end. I was met by my landlady with many a melancholy "Ah, sir!" and actually the good ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with an aspirated h, when the accented syllable of the word is the second. For myself, so long as I continue to aspirate the h's in such words as heroic, harangue, and historical, I shall continue to use a before them; and when I adopt the Cockney mode of pronouncing such words, then I shall use an before them. To my ear it is just as euphonious to say, "I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon an high mountain ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... treat to see any one enjoy anything as you enjoy this music," she said to me. She spoke well, perhaps rather too carefully, and with a hint of the cockney accent. ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... alter the character of his countenance, and, without any resort to paints or cosmetics, had somehow or other given to the expression of his face an impudent, low-bred expression, with a glass screwed on to his right eye,—such a look as a cockney journeyman, wishing to pass for a "swell" about town, may cast on a servant-maid in the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... took to quizzing me on my plans, partly in Yiddish and partly in broken English, which he uttered with a strong Cockney accent, a relic of the several years he had ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... he asked. The soft sing-song intonation common to all Devon voices fell very pleasantly on ears accustomed to the Cockney twang of ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... your toes crashing through your boots at every step; with your knee-brakes refusing to work, your thighs creaking, your joints spavined. The views were wonderful. But, oh, the price he paid! The air was intoxicating. But what, he asked himself, was wine to a dead man! Miserable little cockney that he was he told himself a hundred times a day that if he ever survived this he'd never look at another view again, unless from the Woolworth Tower, on a calm day. He thought of New York as a traveller, dying of thirst in the desert, thinks of the lush green oasis. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Islington. The rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical Cockney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... sir," interrupted a voice in vigorous cockney, "this 'ere tide ain't in the 'abit o' waitin'. If we go to-night, we go this minute, sir!" It was the skipper, and ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... hazardous work of cleaning up the wharves and warehouses and sprinkling them with petroleum. Six prisoners volunteered, but they might better have served out their terms, for the next day four of them were dead. Though the stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were exposed. But life in a land like Borneo breeds fatalism. As an official ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... say what they please about Cockney pastorals; but after all, there is a vast deal of rural beauty about the western vicinity of London; and any one that has looked down upon the valley of Westend, with its soft bosom of green pasturage, lying open to the south, and dotted ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... name, and nature, the country of the Franks, or free persons; and the first source of European frankness, or franchise. The Latin for franchise is libertas. But the modern or Cockney-English word liberty,—Mr. John Stuart Mill's,—is not the equivalent of libertas; and the modern or Cockney-French word liberte,- -M. Victor Hugo's,—is not the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... hospitality 'from a poor bloke like me,' as he put it. His friendship with Nicoll has been the great event of his life. Whenever anything occurs in the radical movement which recalls ever so slightly the affair of which Nicoll was the scapegoat, his old friend will say, in his funny Jewish Cockney, 'That's always the wey, like Nicoll's kise, for example.' Then he launches forth into eloquent streams of denunciation, for he does not regard Nicoll as at all insane, but on the contrary, 'the finest man ever downed' by aristocrats like Turner ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... principles involved in this war,—a man petrified in English conceit, and at the end of his art when, like a twopenny reporter, he has made a smart little sneer at something or somebody. He writes on America as Sala wrote on Russia, in the same petty, frivolous vein, with the same cockney smartness; but fails to be funny, whereas Sala frequently succeeds. He came here to write for England, not the truth, but something which his readers expected. His object was to supply a demand, and he did it. He learned nothing, and returned as ignorant, so far as really understanding ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... an exile and an alien, Somehow you touched the Cockney nymphs with awe; You lit the cold clay statue, like Pygmalion, To blood-red raptures; you were sib to SHAW; Others might hale the town in cushioned chariots To see them dance or daub, to hear them strum; You also had your moments: jigging Harriets ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... responded Charles, but no one save the traveller at the small table caught the play on words, the Cockney cant term for money being unfamiliar to American ears. He smiled, and then studied the bond-servant with more interest ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... of the absurd pair looked the most ridiculous it would be hard to say: a great-grandson of George the Second in the Highland garb of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," was perhaps as absurd an anachronism as a fat cockney alderman in the same fancy costume. Our friends the caricaturists were fully alive to these puerilities. An anonymous caricature of the day celebrates the ludicrous event in a satire entitled, Equipt for a Northern Visit, which represents the fat king and the fat alderman in kilts, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... afternoon he walked abroad with Jane, who, having lengthened her skirts and put up her hair, was now a young woman looking older than her years. She too had developed. Her lank figure had rounded into pretty curves. Her sharp little Cockney face had filled out. She had a pleasant smile and a capable brow, and, correcting a tendency to fluffiness of hair of which she disapproved, and dressing herself neatly, made herself by no means unattractive. Constant association ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... in this country, at this very moment. One leading New York paper, edited by New England men, during the last controversy about the indemnity to be paid by France, actually styled the Due de Broglie "his grace," like a Grub Street cockney,—a mode of address that would astonish that respectable statesman, quite as much as it must have amused every man of the world who saw it. I have been much puzzled to account for this peculiarity—unquestionably one that exists in the country—but have supposed it must be ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... detail of the brigantine's equipment, rather than attending to the object which so much attracted the looks of his companions. "The night air has taut'ned the cordage of that flying-jib-boom, fellows, until it begins to lift its nose like a squeamish cockney, when he holds it over salt-water! See to it, and bring the spar in line; else shall we have a reproof from the sorceress, who little likes to have any of her limbs deranged. Here, gentlemen, the opinions of the lady may be read, as clearly as ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... was to preach a little sermon on a naughty fish. The "application," though brief, was earnest. To the infant expounder, the subject of his discourse doubtless appeared in the guise of a piscatorial Cockney. After many other the like foreshadowings, and after draining dry his native village, he went, when twelve years of age, to Glasgow University. Professor Jardine, who then held the chair of Logic, was fully alive to the rare promise of his pupil, and said of him subsequently,—"He lived in my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... symmetry of body and limbs they were infinitely superior to the orang outang; so much so, that, but for their long wings, Lieutenant Drummond said they would look as well on a parade ground as some of the old Cockney militia.... These creatures were evidently engaged in conversation; their gesticulation, more particularly the varied action of their hands and arms, appeared impassioned and emphatic. We hence inferred that they were rational beings, and, although not perhaps of so high an order ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... small individual, but possessed of a large stock of clothes, which he was evidently glad to have an opportunity of exhibiting. He first came up with a souwester on his head, the wrong end foremost, and a pair of canvas shoes on his feet,—a sort of miniature Micawber, or first-class cockney "salt," about to breast the briny. This small person's long nose, large ears, and open mouth added to the ludicrousness of his appearance. As the decks were wet and the morning cold, he found the ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... themselves, than the disciples of Barrington: for the uninitiated to understand their modes of expression, is as impossible as for a Buxton to construe the Greek Testament. To sport an Upper Benjamin, and to swear with a good grace, are qualifications easily attainable by their cockney imitators; but without the aid of our additional definitions, neither the cits of Fish-street, nor the boors of Brentford would be able to attain the language of whippism. We trust, therefore, that the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... sorry," cried Jenks, desisting from further efforts, "that I have not recently read one of Bret Harte's novels, or I would speak to you in the language of the mining camp. But in plain Cockney, Miss Deane, we are on to a good thing if only we ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... Tender lying off the Tower. How he had come into the service was not known in the present ship; but the fact was, that he had been one of the swell mob—and had been sent on board the Tender with a letter of recommendation from the magistrates to Captain Crouch. He was a cockney by birth, for he had been left at the work-house of St Mary Axe, where he had been taught to read and write, and had afterwards made his escape. He joined the juvenile thieves of the metropolis, had been sent to ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... man, a tree, a rock, a distant view or a glimpse of the sea; they will not leave one another, and they indulge their pet dislikes: this shies at a camel, that kicks at a dog. Presently Tamaddun, as the Arabs say, "urbanity," or, more literally, being "citified," asserts itself, as in the human cockney; and at last they become cleverer and more knowing than any country-bred. They climb up the ladders of stone with marvellous caution, and slip down the slopes of sand on their haunches; they round every rat-hole ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... same side of the platform-gate as herself a very tall, slim, dandy of an officer was bending over a smartly-dressed girl, smiling at her and whispering. Suddenly the girl turned from him with a disdainful toss of the head and said in a loud, clear Cockney voice: ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... 'eadach', sir," says British, sternly, who piques himself on his grammar and pronunciation, and scorns a cockney. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of British soldier. Unless he is assisted by a kilt the ordinary Frenchman is unable to distinguish between one sort of British soldier and another. He cannot tell—let the ardent nationalist mark the fact!—a Cockney from an Irishman or the Cardiff from the Essex note. He finds them all extravagantly and unquenchably cheerful and with a generosity—"like good children." There his praise is a little tinged by doubt. The British are reckless—recklessness in battle a Frenchman can ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... will come from the children themselves. For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now called "the simple life." Their natural disgust with the visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with "the wind on the heath, brother," and of anarchists who are either too weak to understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the social pressure they can stand and the complexity ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the pirate commander, who had only changed the mode of John's death because he thought that by so doing he should render it more fearful and bitter to the victim, was the means of saving the poor cockney's life. So do revenge and malice often ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... all, if civilisation could result in so bitter a thing as this awful fighting. Man seemed as barbaric as in the days before the Saviour came to redeem the world, and whether we won or lost the war all hopes of a happier state of things were futile. So this Cockney imagined that his condition showed no improvement on that of the savage warrior of two thousand years ago, except in that civilisation had developed finer weapons to kill with and be killed by. The finer instincts had ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... is an English horse trainer, a wide-awake, stocky, well-groomed little cockney. He knows his own mind and sees life altogether through a stable door. Well-dressed for his station, and ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... Untermyer, of New York. On the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, in 1877, Ruskin wrote in Fors Clavigera: "The ill-educated conceit of the artist nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to have a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... he never thought of are walking about the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does this apply merely ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... log, laughs heartily. He produces another cigarette, and tries in vain to light it. Then, as an atrocious little cockney enters whistling gaily, he addresses him ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... also told me to have a lookout for the cook while there and make some inquiries about him. I saluted and left. The first place I went to in the wagon lines was the cookhouse and as I got there I thought I noticed the swish of someone quickly disappearing round the corner and the cockney-cook there informed me that Scotty had spent the previous evening with them and had only ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... were, his ancestral consciousness. I think it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice that suddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he had nothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor who was coming to supper, or the red brick villa, or Peckham or the City of London. Though the old place on the banks of the Usk had been sold fifty years before, still, he was Caradoc of the Garth. I forget how I ended the story: but here was one ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... chin to be stroked the conductor sat with extended baton. Down to the footlights she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated word the house roared its applause. Off pranced the singer to her encore on cavorting toes, down flourished the conductor's baton in a crash of chords, and away to ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... air and walk of a genuine born and bred sporting man, even of the vulgar order. Something about him which reveals the pretender. A would-be hawk with a pigeon's liver,—a would-be sportsman with a Cockney's nurture. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dweller, indweller^; addressee; occupier, occupant; householder, lodger, inmate, tenant, incumbent, sojourner, locum tenens, commorant^; settler, squatter, backwoodsman, colonist; islander; denizen, citizen; burgher, oppidan^, cockney, cit, townsman, burgess; villager; cottager, cottier^, cotter; compatriot; backsettler^, boarder; hotel keeper, innkeeper; habitant; paying guest; planter. native, indigene, aborigines, autochthones^; Englishman, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... one's Ozone, like one's coal, And store it up an-nu-al-lee! And not fly for it to some dull cockney hol Just because it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... maid who could never have existed outside the imagination of an American. I make no complaint of the fact that in a chequered past she had married both Carter's man-servant and the antiquated poet; but I do complain that her Cockney accent was imperfectly consistent both with her rustic origin an apple-cheeked lass, we were told, from somewhere in Kent) and her situation as maid to a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... young Dickens immensely entertaining. He could mimic every one who called at the office, and in addition he knew the different cockney voices of all the rabble of the London streets. He had learnt to know the queer types of people who drifted about the river banks and the poorer sections of the city. He knew every small inflection of their voices and their every trick and gesture, and now he acted ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... thickened by excess, was yet eloquent of the gentleman. The barriers passed, your pariah gentleman can be the completest blackguard of them all. He spoke coarsely, and the infectious Cockney accent showed itself in his vowels; but Dunbar, a trained observer, summed up his man in a moment ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... lie at full length under the trees, in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in the melodious utterances. An indistinct idea that this was pastoral happiness pervaded the camp. "This 'ere kind o' think," said the Cockney Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, "is 'evingly." It reminded ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... left for Canobie, I was completely prostrated, and had no medicine on hand except Epsom salts. During the night we (the cook, a new-chum Cockney, and myself) heard voices down at the water-hole, which we took as from a party of travelling Chinamen. In the morning we found that, some of the blacks who were implicated in the murder had doubled back, and had taken ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... the public buildings I saw were spacious and shabby beyond all cockney belief. Adjoining the Imperial Hotel is a great, large, handsome, desolate reading-room, which was founded by a body of Cork merchants and tradesmen, and is the very picture of decay. Not Palmyra—not the Russell Institution in Great Coram Street—present more melancholy appearances ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... ill-health; he had risen from a newspaper-boy's existence to the dizzy heights of a milkman's cart. His pale face with its prominent eyes and rich, chestnut forelock bore an expression of indomitable Cockney confidence in the ultimate decency of things. He had always been kind to his mother. "More like a girl than a boy," she said, "in the way he cared for his home and looked after me." And now Jimmy was dead: the message had come that he would not return. "And why is he dead," ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... neighborhood in which he had, several years ago, purchased large property. It was said he had got her in London; and nothing was more certain than that she issued forth the English language clothed in an inveterate cockney accent. She was a high moralist, and a merciless castigator of all females who manifested, or who were supposed to manifest, even a tendency to walk out of the line of her own peculiar theory on female conduct. Her weight might be about eighteen stone, exclusive ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... distance, to describe to the best of his ability the things that he had seen. Dr. Johnson, familiar with little else than the view down Fleet Street, could read the description of a Yorkshire moor with pleasure and with profit. To a cockney who had never seen higher ground than the Hog's Back in Surrey, an account of Snowdon must have appeared exciting. But we, or rather the steam-engine and the camera for us, have changed all that. The man who plays tennis every year at the foot of the ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... spoke questioningly: and after what seemed a long pause the answer came, muffled but audible. "Yes, yes! This is Mr. Stephens' office. Who is it wants us from Paris?" The question was put in a Cockney voice, and the London twang seemed exaggerated by its transmission over those miles and miles of wire by land, under the sea, and ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... "Now a horse is different, you never get tired of a good one. He don't fizzle out1 like the rest. You like him better and better every day. He seems a part of yourself; he is your better half, your 'halter hego' as I heard a cockney ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts, Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make cockney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have run for ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... were misfits, out-of-works, the kind of men who join the army because they can do nothing else. There were, in fact, a good many of these. I soon learned, however, that the general out-at-elbows appearance was due to another cause. A genial Cockney ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... God is to receive them in a richly carpeted house, deliciously warmed and perfectly ventilated, where they may adore Him at their ease upon cushioned seats,— secured seats. Yet these spoiled children of comfort, when they ride to or from business or church, fail to assert rights that the benighted Cockney, who never heard of our plumbing and registers, or even the oppressed Parisian, who is believed not to change his linen from one revolution to another, having paid for, enjoys. When they enter the "full" horse-car, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... This seemed a very poor sort of man; a bloated Cockney, with a dirty neck-cloth, vile cuffs of grayish black, and a waistcoat cut ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... student, with the most offensive purity of Cockney accent, was a man of five-and-forty, dressed in a new suit of ready-made tweeds, the folding crease strongly marked down the front of the trousers and the coat sleeves rather too long. His face bore a strong impress of vulgarity, but at the same time had a certain ingenuousness, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... folly! He has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove a cockney. I prithee now, ungird thy strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my lady; shall I vent to her that thou ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... lady love from the poop, sat down abruptly,—the crew likewise; not, however, before she had heeled to the scuppers, and a half-bucket of iced water had run it. Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits's existence, but water... He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer.... The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond, and something cold and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our trousers. We sat ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... quarter before the meeting of the Wild Irish Girls," she said to herself. "Strange, is it not, that I should call myself a Wild Irish Girl when I am a Cockney through and through? Well, whatever happens, I shall be ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail. The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship among ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Prince, when cross and hungry, can be as undesirable a social companion as a Cockney cad, and the Countess's distinguished friend did not show to advantage in the scene which followed. Yes, there had been an accident. It was unheard of—abominable; entirely the fault of the chauffeur. Chauffeurs (and he looked bleakly ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... likely to try," he observed. At which jest she laughed loudly and charmingly, showing marvellous teeth. She had no cockney accent, though she occasionally and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... Latin word is not really an amusing thing. To an ancient Roman, perhaps, it might be. But then we are not ancient Romans; indeed, I imagine that if an ancient Roman could be resurrected, all the Latin that any of our classical scholars can command would be about equivalent to the French of a cockney waiter on a Channel steamer. Yet one finds even the immortal Punch citing recently as a very funny thing a newspaper misquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of "urbi et orbos," or the other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was some further point ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... walked to the police station, where he heard a little of the matter in hand from a constable and then asked for permission to use the telephone. In five minutes he was speaking to his own chief at Scotland Yard, and the familiar cockney voice of Inspector Harrison came over the two hundred odd miles that separated the metropolis of convicts from the ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... printed first in Jamieson's collection—1806; again in Chambers's, p. 150. The 'waly' has been by Cockney critics called Scotch for 'wail ye.' The word may come from the same etymological source as 'wail,' but it is a Scots adverb, indicative of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... attentions on the wide pavements, holding them up to observation, marking them in red, and babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and bypaths. They are cockney and are interested in showing only the highroads between cities, and in consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings. In a word, they are against the jog-trot countryside and conspire with the signposts ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... conceived in the spirit of that humane humor which blends the ludicrous and the pathetic in one. Joe Sedley, the East Indian, slightly suggests Major Bagstock. He has the major's physical circumference, apoplectic turn and swell of manner, with the addition of Cockney vulgarity and cowardice. His retreat from Brussels, just before the battle of Waterloo, is described with the art of a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various |
