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.

For more than a century and a half Margate has been a holiday-place, and therefore wears an air of permanency which not even Brighton can beat, although its front is more miscellaneous and less stately. In fact, it looks whimsically as though one side of Gower Street had come down from London, for a change—and had not yet benefited by it! Matthew Arnold must have been similarly impressed when he wrote that this was a “brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—let me add, all its salubrity.” He had, you perceive, an unworthy affection for the tawdry rags of Continental Roman Catholicism, however insalubrious their nature, and in spite of his much-advertised craving for “sweetness and light.”

Arnold’s sneer at Protestantism offended many, but we have travelled far and swiftly on the down-grade in the last half-century, and the thing that would once have seemed impossible has come to pass: Protestantism has become a term of abuse. We have lived to see that!

“Margate” may have been originally the “Meer-geat,” the Anglo-Saxon for “sea-gate”; or more probably the name derived from the “mere,” or little stream, which flowed down to the sea past St. John’s Church, along the line of the street now called The Brooks; “mere” being a well-known Kentish word for a stream. However that may be, Margate is really of ancient origin: an historical fact rather obscured by the growth of the town. Still, one has only to seek that old parish church of St. John to perceive that this was an established place in Norman times. Strange though it may seem, “Margate” was once considered a separate village or hamlet on the seashore, as we read in the itinerary of John Leland, in the time of Henry the Eighth: “Meregate lyith in St. John’s paroche in Thanet v miles upward from Reculver; there is a village and a peere for shyppes now sore decayed.”

It is an extremely dark and rather dirty church, tucked away in an obscure situation, and thus not often seen by the chance visitor. It stands at the back of the harbour, among little odd Georgian streets, and tiny squares of a kind of dolls’-house type, and is surrounded by a mangy churchyard containing trees which look as though they were longing for the country. There are no fewer than thirteen brasses here, all greatly worn, including that to John Daundelyon already mentioned, and a late example, dated 1615, to Roger Morris, with a ship in full sail and an inscription describing him as “one of the six principall Masters of Attendance of his Mai^ties Navye Royall.” But the most curious is the fragment of a palimpsest brass hinged in a frame on the south wall of the chancel. The original was evidently a very large example of Flemish make and is curiously engraved with vine-tendrils, a shield of arms displaying three helmets on a field of crosses, two odd nude creatures on stilts, one kicking the other, reckless of maintaining his equilibrium; and a little monkish figure trying to catch monstrous butterflies as big as himself with a net smaller than the butterflies. This futile endeavour may or may not be intended as a satire upon the vanity of human wishes; but, in any case, it is a matter for rejoicing that butterflies larger than turkeys do not exist.

A favourite way of reaching Margate from London before the era of steamships and railways was by what most of the passengers called “the ’oy,” a conveyance which appeared in print with an “H” denied it in speech. The “Margate Hoy” was a type of sailing-vessel by which our ancestral holiday-makers arrived with much pleasure, or intolerable discomfort as the case might be, after a calm voyage of ten hours, or a tempestuous passage of fifteen. The hoys set sail from the Thames, near the Customs House quay, and conveyed passengers at the extremely moderate fare of half a crown. In after-years, when steamships replaced these clumsy, bluff-bowed old sailing-vessels, which after all looked and behaved like sailing-barges, the “Husbands’ Boat,” steaming from London on Saturdays, became the main feature of the Margate season. To-day there are still Saturday steamers, of a very up-to-date type, to Margate and Ramsgate; but the term “Husbands’ Boat” is altogether outworn and hopelessly stale, now that uxoriousness is no longer even the mark of the middle class and the ideal is, at the best of it, for husbands and wives to make holiday apart, or, at the worst of it, with some one else’s partner.

Margate saw the invention of the bathing-machine about 1765, by that modest Quaker, Benjamin Beale. The immodest modesty of that cumbrous and supremely uncomfortable affair has made the English at the seaside the laughing-stock of other nations; but brother Broadbrim’s invention still lags superfluous on many a seaside scene, although bathing-tents actively dispute possession.

The visitor will not have been long in Margate before his attention is drawn to men distributing bills inviting all and sundry to “Go and see the Grotto!” Among the attractions of this place, set forth on these leaflets, is “two thousand square feet of shellwork”—a kind of decoration sufficient to make the artistic shudder. The “Grotto,” which is really an excavation in the chalk, is situated in Bellevue Place along “The Dane,” a thoroughfare about half a mile from the front. It consists of a passage some 60 ft. in length, ending in a chamber about 12 ft. square. Both passage and chamber are lined with common shells set in cement and displayed in geometrical and floral devices. A great deal of nonsensical legend has accumulated about this place, which is said to be a work of immemorial antiquity. That accepted archÆologist, Miss Marie Corelli, in her book “Cameos,” declares it to be “one of the World’s Wonders,” and “a curious and beautiful subterranean temple”; and believes it to be a work of the Vikings; a catacomb where they buried their dead. Unfortunately for this view, we have only to refer to Charles Knight’s book, “The Land we Live In,” published about 1850, to read that “the shellwork was done by an ingenious artisan of Margate who some years ago went to America.” The chamber was originally, in fact, the basement-room of the little house above, and the plaster ceiling of it remains. Thus do the Vikings vanish and feminine archÆologists become discredited!

To witness Margate in the spring preparing to awake from her winter sleep and to make ready for early visitors is alike amusing and pathetic. The long, empty vista of seaside promenade has as yet no promenaders, but a scattered army of painters and gardeners is busy upon seats, shelters, railings, and flower-beds. Everything is being swept and garnished; and so long and so thoroughly has Margate been looked after by a Town Council, that the parlour-maidenly neatness has spread even to the sands, and you may see Corporation men walking by the sad sea-waves picking up and neatly disposing of the seaweed and other jetsam which the rude and sportive winds have left in unseemly fashion on the ocean’s melancholy marge. Even those ridiculous chalk cliffs are not allowed to present any jagged, picturesque outlines. They are pretty freely cased with brick; but, it must in justice be allowed that they have not been so nearly converted into brick walls as have been the cliffs at Ramsgate. And in another matter, too, Margate has not gone to extremes. Dogs (unless things have latterly been pressed to extremity) may still bark on Margate sands. They may not do so at Hastings, on penalty of the owner being fined by the local Sir Oracles. “Going it!” is said to be the note of Margate. No one who has been there in August will dispute that. Those who do not wish to “go it,” and would rather enjoy a quiet, contemplative holiday, had better go elsewhere. Margate makes merry (this alliteration is positively infectious) from early morn till dewy eve. You awake to a concert of sounds, in which the bugling and clarionetting of early brake-parties is brassily prominent, and at night are sent to sleep by the slowly expiring minstrelsy of varied bands. Let it be added that the air of Margate is so forceful that even those constitutionally and mentally averse from all that “going it!” may be taken to mean let themselves go here. There was once a highly respectable curate who “went it!” to such an extent—but that is not our business.

Both Ramsgate and Margate claim the story of the typically pursy, Perkyn Middlewick type of city man who, stepping on to the railway platform on the arrival of the train and feeling already the enliving effect of the atmosphere, exclaimed, “Isn’t this invigorating?”

“No, sir,” returned a porter, “it’s Margate” (or Ramsgate, as the case may be).

Some few have not the capacity for enjoyment. Sometimes you see, along these crowded sands, tearful small boys who have somehow missed the note of the place. “I have brought you out to enjoy yourself, sir,” said a robustious father to such an one; “and if you don’t begin to do it pretty quick, you’d better go home!” Margate has a wonderful reputation for its rough, vigorous, revivifying air; it is also known at one season of the year—may it be hinted without offence?—for its very rough, vigorous coast population. A once well-known actor who long since joined the great majority and exchanged his fame for oblivion used to illustrate this in one of his breezy anecdotes. He and a friend, in a sailing-vessel, found themselves in difficulties in a fog. Suddenly conscious, by sounds and dim lights, that they were off a coast town, they hailed the shore: “Ahoy! ahoy! Where are we?” A thunderous voice responded through the fog, “Go to ——,” whereupon Ryder, the actor in question, turning to his friend, exclaimed: “All right, my boy—Margate!”

Somewhat similar testimony—although not specifically limited to Margate—may be found in the pages of a familiar novelist; Mr. Thomas Hardy remarking, in that beautiful story “A Pair of Blue Eyes,” that “it has been calculated by philosophers that more ‘damns’ go up to heaven from the Channel, in the course of a year, than from all the five oceans put together.”

It is a profane way of stating a fact of which no one will be concerned to deny the truth.

Not only the seafaring and the coastwise populations indulge in strong language: conversation in general along the roads is decidedly over-proof. There is too much “damyer” about the roadside intercourse of these parts, produced largely by the animosities of motorists and the drivers of chars-À-bancs, who do not love one another, but unite and make common cause against the electric tramways in vituperation. The tramways, the chars-À-banc traffic, and the motor-cars have indeed greatly changed the aspect of Thanet and its seaside resorts. The “oldest inhabitant” of some few years hence will be able to tell strange tales of a time when he knew of rural roads and saw wild-flowers:

THE GAFFER’S STORY