at a rental of £50 ("History of Pickwick "). An undated letter to his betrothed describing Messrs. Chapman and Hall's proposal is said by the editors of "The Letters of Charles Dickens" to have been written in '1835; but their comments upon another letter to which they give the same date show so much confusion that little weight can be given to their opinions on the subject. We know for certain that the prospectus of " Pickwick" was issued at the end of February, 1836, and that the first number, consisting of twenty-four pages of letter-press with four drawings by Seymour, was published on March 31st. Two days later, on April 2nd, Easter Eve, Dickens was married at St. Luke's Church, Chelsea, to Catherine Hogarth. To meet the expenses of the wedding he had drawn in advance from

Messrs. Chapman & Hall the payment for two numbers of "Pickwick." The price which had been verbally agreed upon was, according to the letter already mentioned from Dickens to Miss Hogarth, fourteen pounds a month; according to Mr. Chapman fifteen pounds a month. The receipt shows that the sum actually paid for the first two numbers was twenty-nine pounds, but the payment was to depend to some extent upon sales, which, from a miserable average of fifty for the first four or five numbers, rose so quickly after the introduction of Sam Weller that with No. 15 they amounted to 40,000, and steadily increased to the end. The total sum paid to Dickens in cash for the work was £2,500 or £3,000.

In the first number of the "Pickwick

Papers" Dickens carried his hero to Rochester, "the neighborhood to which at all. times of interest in his life he turned with

a strange recurring fondness" (Forster), and to Chalk, a village about five miles. from Rochester, about two miles from Gravesend, and about two miles from his future home at Gad's Hill, he took his bride for the honeymoon. The farmhouse in which they lodged still stands. The late Mr. E. L. Blanchard has stated (Kitton's "Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil") that in later years, when he was living at Rosherville and Dickens at Gad's Hill, they often met in their daily walk "at about the same spot."

"This was on the outskirts of the village of Chalk, where a picturesque lane branches off towards Shorne and Cobham. Here the brisk walk of Charles Dickens was always slackened, and he never failed to gaze meditatively for a few moments at the windows of a corner house on the southern side of the road, advantageously situated for commanding views of the river and the farstretching landscape beyond. It was in that house he had lived immediately after his marriage."

It seems likely that the honeymoon holiday lasted for a fortnight-from Saturday, April 2nd, to Saturday, April 16th. At all events, before April 20th, the date of Seymour's death and before the second number of "Pickwick" was "completely written," the newly-married pair, as we learn from two letters which Dickens addressed thirty years afterwards to the Athenæum, had come home to the chambers in Furnival's Inn. Until the inn was pulled down, in 1897, to make place for new buildings, there was no place haunted with such pathetic memories of the great novelist as the three rooms on the top floor of No. 15. "I wish you could know," he wrote to his mother-inlaw, Mrs. Hogarth, in a letter dated "October 26, 1837," five months after Mary's death and seven months after he had moved his household from Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street:

"I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival's Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, banterings round the fire, were more precious to bestowed upon our evening's work, in our merry

me than the applause of a whole world would be."

And in a Diary now preserved in the Forster Collection at South Kengington he wrote:

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SATURDAY, 6th January, 1838. "Our boy's birthday-One year old. . This day last year Mary and I wandered up and down Holborn and the streets about for hours, looking after a little table for Kate's Bedroom, which we bought at last at the very first broker's which we had looked into, and which we had passed half a dozen times, because I didn't like to ask the price. I took her out to Brompton at night, as we had no place for her to sleep in (the two mothers being with us). She came back again next day to keep house for me, and stopped nearly the rest of the month. I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers three stories high-never, if I roll in wealth and fame. I would hire them to keep empty if I could afford it. "

The chambers, as has been said, exist no longer. By the courtesy of the last tenant I visited them a few days before their destruction, and wrote for the London Graphic a description, from which I may be permitted to refresh my recollection of an experience which gave me at the time a very vivid picture of the early domestic life of the most popular novelist of the century.

As one mounted the stone stairs (there were sixty-one) that led to the chambers, one's left hand on the well-worn brass banister, it needed little effort of mind. flight to see the figures coming and going as they came and went in those young days. One saw the young man with the brown hair and merry eyes, bounding up two or three stairs at a stretch; one heard from the heights above the girlish laughter which greeted his homecoming, and one knew all the Inn knew-that the "House was up." One saw Charles's

brother Fred bringing proofs from the publisher's, and the latest news, sadly disappointing at first, of the sales of "Pickwick." One saw the pompous but careless father, many of whose pleasantries of speech and manner crept later into Mr. Micawber, as proud of the fame of "Boz," as if it were wholly due to his example and guidance. One saw the careworn but unpractical mother, and one thought of Mrs. Nickleby. One saw Seymour carrying his etching for "the Stroller's Tale." One knew that it was his first journey up and down these stairs, and that within forty-eight hours he would be lying dead, shot by his own hand. Of the candidates for his place, the fancy has no room for more than one. He was a young man who brought two or three drawings as examples of his work. The author of "Pickwick" did not think them good

enough,* and we rejoice that it was so, for this would-be illustrator was destined for greater things. Of the many coincidences of life upon which Dickens loved to dwell, none surely was stranger than this bringing together of the two men, the one unknown, the other as yet only beginning to be known, who were to give the literature of the Longest Reign its greatest lustre. If we feel a momentary regret that the coincidence was not carried a little farther, and that "Pickwick" was not illustrated, however badly, by the author of "Vanity Fair" we cannot, on consideration, but be thankful that no en

* Dexter ("Hints to Collectors") says that Thackeray supposed he had secured the appointment, and that "tradition says that he and Browne dined off sausages and mashed potatoes to celebrate the event." On the other hand Mr. Kitton (" Dickens and his Illustrators ") states, what is more likely, that the traditional dinner was held in honor of Browne's appointment.

couragement was offered by Dickens to Thackeray to follow a path which might have led him by ever so little astray from the more serious field of work to which his great genius called him.

When at last the pilgrim reached the outer door of the third- floor chambers and was admitted "first into a little closet of a hall and next into a little sitting-room," it was borne in upon him that these were the chambers wherein Tommy Traddles lived, and whereat he was visited by David Copperfield ("David Copperfield," Chapter LIX). The stairs leading up to Straddles's chambers were, it is true, the wooden stairs of Gray's Inn, but the rooms were those on the topmost floor of No. 15 Furnival's Inn.

"The whole set-I mean the chambers-is only three rooms; but Sophy manages for the girls in the most wonderful way, and they sleep as comfortably as possible. 'Three in that room,' said Traddles, pointing, 'two in that.'"-" David Copperfield," Chapter LIX.

The set had three windows in front and one at the back of the inn. In the photograph of the outside of No. 15 is to be seen a row of five windows on the top floor of the central building. Of these, the

three to the right belonged to Dickens's set, and of these three the two on the right belonged to the sitting-room, and the other to a little chamber adjoining it, which was no doubt occupied by Mary Hogarth. There was no kitchen or larder or housewifery convenience of any kind, nothing but the three little rooms and the "little closet of a hall." Immediately opposite the door of the sitting-room, on the other side of this closet, was the entrance to the best bedroom-a room with one window, having a gloomy view of roofs and chimney-pots. One quickly turned away from the dispiriting outlook to glance back through the open doors into the little sitting-room, so full of memories-altogether cheerful-of household economy, according to Traddles; of "merry banterings round the fire"; of hard work easily done amid such distracting pleasantries as would be fatal to thoughtful effort in any but the young and vigorous; of Pickwickian fancies, humorous and pathetic, smoothed and softened by girlish criticism before being sent forth to shake the world with tears and laughter.

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NTHONY TROLLOPE was accustomed to make three boasts-that his family had contributed more volumes to the world's library than any other clan; that he himself had published more books than any other writer, and that it was his distinction to have received the greatest number of floggings recorded in the annals of English youths. The first claim is well nigh indisputable, such sevenleagued boots did the literary genius of the Trollopes wear, traveling so fleetly over so many miles of pages as to encourage one's thinking the preacher had them. in mind when he lamented the "making many books." The claim about Anthony's individual fecundity, the shades of Voltaire, and of Varro, that voluminous ancient, might challenge; though, indeed, Trollope used to console himself by saying that his own books were surely longer

than Varro's, published in the days of smaller volumes; and the fact that Varro and Voltaire were dead and turned to dust precluded further work from their pens, while he (sixty years old at the time) was still alive and writing, bidding fair to leave their goals well-past before the term of his literary race was reached. The third boast stands uncontradicted; to Anthony's fame or shame, but also to the immortalization of his schoolmasters as the most perfect exponents of the Draconian sparethe-rod-and-spoil-the-child philosophy ever known. Of those severe enforcers of school-room justice, he used to say: "By their ferules did I know them . . . It was just possible to receive five floggings a day at Winchester, and I have often. boasted that I received them all."

To these three unique recommendations to renown which Trollope vaunted, might