Of all London's poets, Keats, although he belonged to what the Edinburgh critics derided as "The Cockney School," seems least a Cockney. Yet he has written of London in the comic fairy tale" The Cap and Bells." In that poem the Emperor Elfinan's city "in midmost Ind" is in reality London.
There Keats celebrates the new illuminant, gas, curses the hurdygurdies, and describes the discomforts of a hackney coach with as much detail and gusto as Dickens. More interesting still, he describes London as she was not to be seen until more than a hundred years later. When Crafticant flies home on his own wings bringing the Princess Bellanaine to the Emperor :-
The City all her unhiv'd swarms had cast
To watch our grand approach and hail us as we passed.
As flowers turn their faces to the sun,
So on our flight with hungry eyes that gaze
And, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run,
With madcap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze.
Onwards we floated o'er the panting streets,
That seem'd throughout with upheld faces paved.
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