Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/163

RV 146 (REST IN LONDON) out a hand. His voice was sonorous and rather pompous, with the ore rotundo in which Victorian poets used to read their own poems to one another. He uttered:

He added, confidentially and confidently that: into this fane his corpse would be translated by his thousand votaries of the day to come. His name was one that posterity would not willingly let die.

His name was Tockson; he was by trade a cobbler, and he was rather a good poet. I really believe that Posterity might be none the worse if it ever come to read some of the verses that, with his own hands, he printed at odd moments on grocers' bag-paper and stored in the back of his shop. He troubled no reigning sovereign and no established poet with his verses; he never sent them to papers; sometimes he wrapped up repaired boots in an odd sheet, and he was not in the least discontented or in the least mad, unless it be a madness to trust in the literary judgement of Posterity and to take "Marlowe's mighty line" (the words were for ever on his lips) as a model.

He liked these cloisters, he said, because he could "contemplate the memorials" of forgotten monks, legislators, children and philanthropists freezing in the cold and soot outside the walls, whilst it was his destiny to be "translated" from Kensal Green 146