ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. An Autobiography. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 186, STRAND. MDCCCL. ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. CHAPTER I. A POET'S CHILDHOOD. I AM a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey hills, of whose loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairy-land, whose gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two journeys, never to be forgotten, my knowledge of England is bounded by the horizon which encircles Richmond hill. My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious ugliness; the little scraps of garden before the doors, with their dusty, stunted lilacs and balsam poplars, were my only forests; my only wild animals, the dingy, merry sparrows, who quarrelled fearlessly on my window-sill, |