224 ENGLISHSAGA

his own canoe," "to cling to his love like the ivy,5* and to fill
himself up with "beer, beer, glorious beer," bade Tommy make
room for his uncle, and the nation put the foreigner in his place:

" I'd wake men from their torpor, and every foreign pauper
That helps to make the sweater rich, and wages always low,
Pd send aboard a ship, Sir, for an everlasting trip, Sir,
And a chance give to the English if I only bossed the show."

Such rough songs spoke of unchanging English virtues: of
courage and cheerfulness in adversity, of loyalty to old "pals," of
constancy to home and wife. There is scarcely a more beautiful,
there is certainly no more English ballad in the whole range of
song than that which Albert Chevalier wrote for his cockney
impersonation of the old London workman philosophising over
his pipe on the faithful wife of his youth:

* We've been together now for forty years,
And it don't seem a day too much,
Oh, there ain't a lidy living in the land
As I'd swop for my dear ole Dutch.

But above all the music hall expressed the English passion for
liberty: the English desire, so hard to translate into the life of
the factory, to follow the current of one's own nature and be
true to it by being free. What was, however bad it seemed, had to
be and was therefore in a humorous way good, since man being
free could turn his necessity to glorious gain. So the fat woman,
the grace and opportunity of youth gone for ever as it was for
most of her audience, would stand up, mountainous and un-
deterred, and, announced by the leering chairman as "your old
favourite, So-and-So," send her steam-roundabout voice pulsat-
ing through the thick pipe and cigar smoke:

*I weigh sixteen stoney O!
Fm not all skin and boney O!"

So, in a more studied and perfect expression of the inner soul of a
great people who had lost everything but its cheerfulness and
courage, Marie Lloyd in a later age, when the old music hall was
dying, would sing her song "Dilly Dally": a vinous old female,
moist-eyed, wandering but invincible: