“John de Daundeleon with his great dog Brought over this Bell on a Mill-cog.”
The bell is of foreign make. The “dog” in question, it has been explained, was a ship. It will, in this connection, be remembered that antiquaries have sought to explain away Dick Whittington’s famous cat which brought him good fortune, and suppose it to have been the name of a vessel.
We now come again to close quarters with the seashore, which here begins to assume the aspect of what excursionists style the “real seaside.” That is to say, here are cliffs; and there, ahead, is an illimitable horizon; also indubitable sands. It is true they are not cliffs on the heroic scale, these chalky bastions. They begin at Birchington and are continued round to Westgate, Margate, and Ramsgate, with a toylike, artificial effect; rather, you know, as if some enterprising Earl’s Court exhibition syndicate had erected them. They are strangely unconvincing to those who have been used to the great red cliffs of Devon, or the mighty granite heights of Cornwall. Being of no great height, and of such unpicturesque outline, and having been so railed in and scraped and tunnelled and mended with brick, and in all manner of ways impertinently interfered with, they look like the products of art, and very poor art too.
Margate the Merry, to which we enter by electric tramway, is the oldest and most popular of English seaside resorts: and also, in some opinions, the most vulgar. However that may be, and dismissing the claims of Rollicking Ramsgate and Southend (to say nothing of Blackpool and Yarmouth) to pre-eminence in vulgarity, Merry Margate is certainly a very crowded and unselect place in August and on occasions of popular holiday. There is then no doubting the reality of Margate, I assure you, nor, for the matter of that, is it anything less substantial in winter, for the extensive brickiness of it is a solemn fact; but in the dull winter months of short days and bad weather it is something like an elaborate theatrical set scene with the lights turned down and most of the company off the stage. The alleged merriment of Margate, which resides chiefly in the same alliteration that renders Ramsgate “rollicking,” is not a local product. It is imparted by the holiday-makers. At other times the town is extremely sedate; but always (except when a March east wind is blowing) its air is charged with vitality. On one of those occasions, however, Margate looking north-east, on the most exposed north-easterly verge of Kent, the best thing to do is to stay indoors, beside the biggest fire you can induce the grate to hold. Perhaps even the very bestest thing to do is to have that fire in one’s bedroom, and retire to rest with hot-water bottles.