[Picture: “The Drunkard’s Cloak”] Despite its smoke and untidiness, the folks of this grimy Tyneside city have a good conceit of it. To them it is “canny Newcastle,” an epithet whose meaning differs from the Scotch, and here means “fine,” or “neat.” The stranger who fails to find those qualities, who perceives instead the defects of dirt and a pall of smoke that blackens everything to an inky hue, and accordingly thanks Providence that his home is elsewhere, is to the Tynesiders a Goth. For Newcastle is practical. It has its great newspapers, and has produced literary men of note; but the forging of iron and steel, the shrinking of steel jackets upon big guns, the making of ships and all kinds of munitions of war appeal principally to the Novocastrian who may by chance have no especial love of that coaling trade which is pre-eminently and historically his. It is therefore quite characteristic of Newcastle folks that, in the mid-century, a literary man, since become famous, was as a boy solemnly warned by a townsman against such a career as he was contemplating. “Ah’m sorry,” said he, “to hear that ye want to go to London, and to take to this writing in the papers. It’ll bring ye to no good, my boy. I mind there was a very decent friend of mine, auld Mr. Forster, the butcher in the Side. He had a laddie just like you; and nothing would sarve him but he must go away to London to get eddicated, as he called it; and when he had got eddicated, he wouldn’t come back to his father’s shop, though it was a first-class business. He would do nothing but write, and write, and write; and at last he went back again to London, and left his poor old father all alone; and ah’ve never heard tell of that laddie since!” Of course he had not. What rumours of literary life in London could then have penetrated to the shores of the “coaly Tyne.” That laddie, however, was John Forster, the biographer of Dickens.