Dickens-Land

n, Cockermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, tions with the life and the genius of Scott, for all its associa- is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is with Dickens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to Landport in South- sea. The Dickens pilgrim treads in the most palpable footsteps of Boz amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too rapidly disappearing, and through the rich and varied landscape on either side of the Medway, covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill or a dis- tant church, which Dickens loved from boyhood, peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for his last and most-cherished habitation. What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to Dickens in his later years was Gadshill Place. From his study window in the grave red-brick house on his little Kentish freehold a house which he had added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly irregular and as violently opposed most hopeful man could possibly desire he looked to all architectural ideas as the out, so he wrote to a friend, on as pretty a view as you will find in a long days English ride. . . . Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house the distant Thames is in front the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and cathedral, on one side. On every side he could not fail to reach, in those brisk walks with which he sought, too stren- uously, perhaps, health and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter. On those seven miles between Rochester and Maid- stone, which he discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a pleasant old Elizabethan mansion as Cobtree Hall, the very type, it may be, of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, or for a longer tramp to Town Mailing, from which he may well have borrowed many strokes for the picture of Muggleton, that town of sturdy Kentish cricket. Sometimes he would walk across the marshes to Gravesend, and returning through the village of Chalk, would pause for a retrospective glance at the house where his honeymoon was spent and a good part of Pickwick planned. In the latter end of the year, when he could take a short cut through the stubble fields from Higham to the marshes lying further down the Thames, he would often visit the desolate churchyard where little Pip was so terribly frightened by the convict. Or, descending the long slope from Gadshill to Strood, and crossing Rochester Bridge over the balustrades of which Mr...