Different as they are, the majority of these poets, born of the merchants and clerks of the City, have an unusual remoteness and austerity. Spenser, Milton, Cowley, and Gray were great scholars as well as poets, and Keats, although not a scholar, was far away from London in "Tempe and the Dales of Arcady."
Yet in them all, except Gray, are to be found some memories of London. No man ever wrote more sweetly and graciously of the place of his birth than Chaucer in "The Testament of Love" "The citye of London that is to me so dere and swete, in which I was forthgrowen; and more kyndely love have 1 to that place than to any other in yerth."
In his "Cook's Tale" there is a portrait of the idle apprentice, brown-faced, black-haired, and jolly as a goldfinch but it is odd that while there are five city merchants in his company of pilgrims he describes none of them.
Yet is there really no Cockney in that Company? When you look at the friar-though there is no hint that he is from London - at his eyes "twinkling in his head like stars on a frosty night," at his knowledge of the taverns in every town, his friendship with all the ostlers and the tapsters, his gift for song, and, above all, the way he had with men and women, you say "Cockney or no, this man might have been Sam Weller's brother."
Milton was certainly thinking of London when he wrote in "L'Allegro" of the joys of "towred cities," for in his Latin epistle to his old school friend Diodati he writes by name of the "towred city" of London, shutting within her walls whatever of beauty the world holds, her streets as full of lovely girls as the sky of stars.
Spenser remembers best her river. In the Faerie Queene is that noble pageant of all the rivers of the world at the marriage of Thames and Medway, and his spousal verses for the ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset move to the refrain:
Swete Themmes runne softly, till I end my song.
And of London he has given us an epithet that, from him, is worth having:
Meiy London, my most kyndly Nurse.
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