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say a horse at a gallop, Tom,' returned the guard, leaving his hold of the door, and mounting nimbly to his seat. 'Gentlemen, in the king's name all of you.' With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the defensive."

Then to the Dover Mail as it stood on the top of Shooter's Hill entered Mr. Jerry Cruncher; remarkable for his leaning towards pursuits of an agricultural character, carried on in churchyards at one in the morning with the assistance of a sack, a crowbar of conve

I declare that I think this second chapter of A Tale of Two Cities a picture of the old coaching days more perfect than any that has been painted. Every detail is there in three pages. Every colour, every suggestion, from "the mildewy inside of the old Mail, with its damp and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity," to the guard's arm-chest where the blunderbuss lay recondite; to that smaller chest too in which there were a few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. "For he was furnished

nient size, a rope and chain, and other fishing tackle of that nature; remarkable also, on his domestic side, for a wife much given to flopping herself down and praying that the bread and butter might be snatched out of the mouth of her only child. Mr. Cruncher was not on a body-snatching expedition on this occasion however; though Mr. Lorry's answer, "Recalled to life "-a verbal answer to the letter of which Jerry was bearerstruck him as ominous decidedly.

Who does not remember all these things? Who has not read them again and again?

with such completeness that if the coach lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in five minutes." I can see the passengers hiding their watches and purses in their boots (still fearful that the messenger who had stopped the Mail was a highwayman), their hearts beating loud enough to be heard, and the panting of the horses communicating a tremulous motion to the coach-as if it too

were in a state of agitation. Which fancied peril passed-if we had been in the Dover Mail on that memorable night with Mr. Jarvis Lorry-we should have probable taken our watches gradually out of our boots as we passed Welling, Bexley Heath, and Crayford, in order that on arrival at the Bull Inn at Dartford, we might walk to thy bar comfortably to take a drink.

And The Bull at Dartford looks, at the present time of speaking, much as it must have done to the passengers by the Dover Mail in 1775. It is indeed one of the finest of the many fine inns on the Dover Road;

Petoption Hoye
Raberter

From a Drawing by HERBERT RAILTON,

and the Dover Road shines conspicuously in its inns. Here at The Bull at Dartford we have a galleried courtyard (not however rendered more interesting to artistic eyes by the addition of a glass roof, under which local corn-dealers try to get the best of a bargain). We have also the low archway decorated with game suspended, the kitchen on one side, the bar on the other, and a general atmosphere of deliberate travelling and sleepy comfort. Also a reminiscence of antiquity for The Bull, according to local legend and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, was a flourishing concern five centuries ago.

In

front of the old house the impetuous Wat Tyler began his historical record in the fifth year of Richard the Second by incontestably demonstrating to an incredulous crowd that the local poll-tax collector had brains. In truth he spread them coram populo upon the Green. Much history has passed in front of the old inn of course since those exhilarating days; in 1822 perhaps scene the last. For then while the great Fourth George was

majestically reposing in his royal post-chaise in front of the old archway he experienced an unpleasant surprise. A very ungentlemanly man named Calligan, a working courier who ought to have known better, suddenly projected his head into the carriage window, and observed in a voice of thunder, "You're a murderer!" an historical allusion to the king's late treatment of Queen Caroline, which made the royal widower "sit up." Upon which a by-stander named Morris knocked the personal courier down, and the window of the post-chaise was pulled up, and the post-boy told to drive on as quick as possible.

But I cannot leave Dartford without visiting Place House, a delightful record of the Middle Ages, standing in immediate juxtaposition to an ironfoundry and a railway station, and approached by a narrow lane rich in black mud. We are indebted for Place House, as to much that is picturesque in England, to the monks-or rather in this case (I beg the ladies' pardon) to the nuns. For the house founded by Edward the Third was a priory of Augustinians to which all the noble ladies in Kent, who had discovered that life is not worth a potato, retired serenely from a tedious world. After the dissolution, Henry the Eighth saw in it a desirable residence for Anne of ClevesPlace House indeed was one of the first manors granted to this little-married but much-dowered lady. In after times the manor was given with many others by James the First to Robert Cecil, in exchange for Theobalds (the Stuart king's Naboth's vineyard), and here its history ends; but it is a charming place to feast the eyes upon still, and is best looked at from the farm-yard.

There is nothing much now to see or describe in the eight miles which separate Dartford from Gravesend. Cardinal Wolsey however was down this part of the Dover Road in 1527, with his usual brobdingnagian retinue. The cardinal in his prosperous days

must have been a deuce of a person to ask

to one's country-house as Sir John Wilshyre of Stone Place discover

ed on this identi

cal occasion.

For

Stone Place was not big enough for Wolsey's nine hundred followers, and so most of them had to be put up at Dartford, and Sir John had to pay the bill.

People now go to Gravesend to embark in P. and O. steamers for the uttermost parts of the earth, and so it is still a busy place. But it was always busy even in the old times, and was then additionally picturesque. At Gravesend distinguished visitors to London made up their minds as to whether they would approach the capital by the river or the Dover Road. And if they decided on the river, there was generally a gorgeous sight to be witnessed on

"The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green"

The

-the Thames that is to say of the sixteenth century, and Mr. William Morris. present Lord Mayors' Shows give us no conception I fear of the gorgeous processions which attended the passage of distinguished visitors up the river in the days when the Thames looked as Mr. Morris has described it, and the Lord Mayor of London was the important personage that French dramatists still believe him to be. Cardinal Pole came by this route on his return from exile, and the Poet Laureate in Queen Mary has put a fine passage into his mouth descriptive of his experience. With "royal barges" however, "thrones of purple on decks," "silver crosses" sparkling before prows, ripples twinkling in their diamond dance, boats as glowing gay as regal gardens, we have nothing to do, so

From a Drawing by HERBERT RAILTON.

lers who were carrying money to the king's exchequer, in order that he might divert it to The King's Arms. And here he was robbed of what he had robbed by his graceless confederates childishly bent on a practical joke.

Here too from his house on Gad's Hill (and a very hideous house it is) Charles Dickens, having a full view of the scene of this Shakesperian interlude, gave novel after wonderful novel to an astonished world, which was never sated with a humour and an observation of life which were indeed Shakesperian; but kept craving and calling for more, and for more-till the magician's brain was hurt, and the magic pen began to move painfully and with labour, and the chair on Gad's Hill was found one June morning to be empty for

some great

embodied

joy had left the

world, and silence

had fallen on places

of divine laughter. So men must have felt, I think, when Rabelais died-Rabelais, the man who first taught a monk-ridden world how to shake its sides; so men must have felt, I think, when the day destined for the departure came to Swift and Fielding and Sterne Sterne so much maligned by Coleridge and Thackeray and others, yet of all his contemporaries the most profound, the most misunderstood. Yes, the feeling was general, I think, that English literature had suffered an irremediable loss by Dickens's death; and time has confirmed the fear. We have abandoned laughter in these days for documentary evidence, psychology, realism, and other prescriptions for sleep, and have entered on a literary era, which has

lost all touch and sympathy with Dickens, and is indeed divinely dull.

The above may appear perhaps in a coaching article, a literary digression, but it is in truth but a resurrection pie of thoughts which occurred to me and would occur to any real lover

From a Drawing by HERBERT RAILTON.

of Dickens-in the course of that two mile seven furlong walk on the Dover Road between Gad's Hill and Rochester, which the great author used to cover nearly every other day of his life. For Rochester is as closely associated with. Dickens as Chaucer is with Canterbury, or