Whitefield's Tabernacle, that early home of Dissent,--where, in 1824, Edward Irving delivered his famous missionary oration of three-and-a-half hours,--stands near by in Tottenham Court Road. Erected first by the preacher George Whitefield in 1756, and called then "Whitefield's Soul Trap,"--it has been many times rebuilt,--and is now just re-opened as an imposing red-brick and ornate edifice, on its original site. Notwithstanding its deplorable newness, it perpetuates the memory of Whitefield, Toplady, and John Wesley; and it was here, by a curious coincidence, that two ministers preached their own funeral sermons! With Carlyle too, although his chosen home was in far-away Chelsea, Bloomsbury has associations. At No. 6 Woburn Buildings,--in a dingy little paved by-way close to New St. Pancras Church, Euston Road,--Carlyle lodged for a short time in 1831--when trying to get his _Sartor Resartus_ taken by a publisher. In these lodgings ("a very beautiful sitting-room, quiet and airy" he describes it), Edward Irving, his friend, had also stayed. And 5 Ampton Street, Mecklenburgh Square, was another London lodging of Carlyle's--frequented before the Chelsea days began in 1834. But, of the many literary men who have lived in and around Bloomsbury, none is more associated with the locality than Charles Dickens. Tavistock House has been recently pulled down; it was an unassuming, ugly, semi-detached dwelling with a heavy portico, one of three houses all now destroyed, railed off from the eastern side of Tavistock Square, and entered from it through an iron gateway. This was the novelist's home for ten years, from 1850 to 1860. He, and his famous New Year's theatricals, are still a recollection of the older residents in the neighbourhood. The annual plays of Tavistock House, performed "in a theatre erected in the garden," and written and stage-managed under the collaboration of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, are now matter of history. _Bleak House_ was the earliest work written here. The house after Dickens's time became a Jews' college, and the pupils "recreated" in the novelist's theatre-garden. It is now a sad scene of desolation. Memories of Bloomsbury haunt many of Dickens's works, but none are better or more lifelike in their way than his early sketches of the immortal Mrs. Tibbs--type of her class--and her select boarding house in Great Coram Street, in "that partially explored tract of country which lies between the British Museum and a remote village called Somers Town." Mrs. Tibbs's advertisement to the effect that "six individuals would meet with all the comforts of a cheerful musical home in a select private family, residing within ten minutes' walk of everywhere," is still not uncommonly met with.