The Haunts of Old Cockaigne

When, in our too infrequent talks, I have confessed my growing fondness for life in London, your kindly countenance has assumed an expression so piteous that my Conscience has turned upon what I am pleased to call my Mind, to demand explanation of a feeling so distressing to so excellent a friend. My Mind, at first, was disposed to apologise. It pleaded its notoriously easy-going character: it had never met man or woman that it had not more or less admired, nor remained long anywhere without coming to strike kinship with the people and to develop pride in their activities. In its infancy it had been as Badisch as the Grossherzog of Baden, and had deemed lilac-scented Carlsruhe the grandest town in the world. In blue-and-white Lutetia, it had grown as Parisian as an English dramatist. When the fickle Fates moved it on to Manchester, it had learned in a little while to ogle Gaythorn and Oldham Road as enchanted Titania ogled her gentle joy, the loathly Bottom. It had looked with scorn on the returned prodigals who had been to London-"to tahn," they called it-and who came back to their more or less marble halls in Salford with trousers turned up round the hems, shepherds' crooks to support their elegantly languid totter, and words of withering scorn for the streets of Peter and Oxford, which my Mind had learned to regard as boulevards of dazzling light.