Provided with a selection of books inseparably connected with the subject of our tour, including, of course, copies of _Pickwick_, _Great Expectations_, _Edwin Drood_, _The Uncommercial Traveller_, Bevan's _Tourist's Guide to Kent_, one or two local Handbooks, one of Bacon's useful cycling maps, with a sketch map of the geology of the district (which greatly helped us to understand many of its picturesque effects, and was kindly furnished by Professor Lapworth, LL.D., F.R.S., of the Mason College, Birmingham), and with a pocket aneroid barometer, which every traveller should possess himself with if he wishes to make convenient arrangements as regards weather, we make a preliminary tramp in London. CHAPTER II. A PRELIMINARY TRAMP IN LONDON. "We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty."--_Great Expectations._ SOME sixty or seventy years must have elapsed since Dickens (through the mouthpiece of Pip, as above) recorded his first impressions of London; and although he lived in it many years, and in after life he loved to study its people in every stratum of society and every phase of their existence, it seems doubtful, apart from these studies, whether he ever really liked London itself, for in the _Uncommercial Traveller_, on "The Boiled Beef of New England," in describing London as it existed subsequently, he contrasts it unfavourably in some respects, not only with such continental cities as Paris, Bordeaux, Frankfort, Milan, Geneva, and Rome, but also with such British cities as Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Exeter, and Liverpool, with such American cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and with "a bright little town like Bury St. Edmunds." Nevertheless, it is indubitable that his writings, beyond those of any other author, have done wonders to popularize our knowledge of London,--more particularly the London of the latter half of the last and the first half of the present century,--and that those writings have given it a hold on our affections which it might not otherwise have acquired. In almost all his works we are introduced to a fresh spot in the Metropolis, perhaps previously known to us, but to which the fidelity of his descriptions and the reality of the characters peopling it, certainly give a historical value never before understood or appreciated. In _The Life of Charles Dickens_, written by his devoted friend, John Forster, may be found a corroboration of this view:--