If great men's houses, or the houses that great men have ever, temporarily, lived in, could all be designated by some unobtrusive memorial tablet, such, for instance, as the Carlyle bas relief at Chelsea,--or even a plain inscription such as those recently placed on John Ruskin's birthplace in Hunter Street, Reynolds's house in Leicester Square, and Sir Isaac Newton's in St. Martin's Street,--what an interest would it not lend to even "long and unlovely" London streets! For the romance of houses is not divined by instinct; and even the taste of a Morris or a Rossetti has not always left its mark on their London abodes. That Dickens, Thackeray, John Leech, Darwin, the Rossettis, William Morris, have all lived in and about Bloomsbury, is not patent to the casual visitor. Does not even the plain inscription, "Poeta Inglese, Shelly," (_sic_) lend an added glamour to the Lung' Arno of Pisa? The dividing line between history and fiction is not always very strongly marked; and this leads us to consider yet another aspect of the question. A curious literary interest sometimes attaches to certain houses, an interest hardly less deep for being partly, or even purely, fictitious. Among the many novelists who have made themselves responsible for this, none, perhaps, have been more prominent than Charles Dickens. Dickens, whose knowledge of London was, like his own Sam Weller's, "extensive and peculiar," has invested certain houses, certain localities, with an almost human sentiment and pathos. Thackeray has also done much, yet not so much as his contemporary, towards making London stones famous. The tenants of "historic houses" in this sense--houses on whom these and other writers have conferred immortality--are, of course, merely the "ghosts of ghosts," and yet, how real, how persistent are they, with the majority of us! Harry Warrington enjoying the May sun from his pleasant window in Bond Street; old Colonel Newcome kneeling among the "Grey Friars" of the Charterhouse; the pretty old house and garden in Church Street, Kensington, where Miss Thackeray's charming heroine, Dolly, lived; little David Copperfield at the waterside blacking warehouse; poor weeping Nancy on the steps of Surrey Pier, by London Bridge; ragged Jo at the grating of the squalid burying-ground: they and their sorrows are more real, more vivid, to us than the actual sufferings of the boy Chatterton, the "Titanic" agony of spoiled Byron, or the short glories of Lady Jane Grey. And, indeed, when we call to mind the gay vision of the "ladies of St. James's" taking the air, we think as much of such personages as Thackeray's beautiful Beatrix, wayward and heartless, and of her solemn cousin, Colonel Esmond,--as of Mrs. Pepys, in her noted "tabby suit," or of my Lady Castlemaine herself, in all her beauty, attended by her royal admirer.