"Gad's Hill House stands a little way back from the road. The grand highway between London and Dover, not to speak of between Gravesend and Rochester, it was as gay as an approach to a metropolis. Ninety-two public coaches and pleasure-vans used to pass in the day, not counting the private carriages of the grandees posting luxuriously to Dover for Paris and the grand tour. Soldiers marching or riding to or from Chatham and Gravesend, to embark for India, or on their return journey home; ships' companies paid off that morning, and cruising past the gates, shouting and singing and comporting themselves in a generally terrifying manner, being, for the most part, half-seas over, and a trifle beyond; gipsies and travelling tinkers; sturdy beggars with stumps and crutches; savoyards with white mice, and organ-men with a wonderful wax doll, two-headed and superbly dressed, in front of their machines; chimney-sweepers, with a couple of shivering, little, half-naked climbing boys carrying their bags and brushes; and costermongers, whose small, flat carts were drawn by big dogs, were also among the accidents and circumstances of the time.... Old Mr. Weller[4] was a real person, and we knew him. He was 'Old Chumley' in the flesh, and drove the stage daily from Rochester to London, and back again." [Illustration: GAD'S HILL PLACE. RESIDENCE OF CHARLES DICKENS.] [Sidenote: DICKENS] It was here, then, that Dickens lived from 1856 to his death, on June 9, 1870, and thus Gad's Hill is, for many, doubly a place of pilgrimage. And, truly, the whole course of the Dover Road is rich in memories of him and of the characters he drew with such a flow of sentimentality; and sentiment is more to the Englishman than is generally supposed. Hence that amazing popularity which is only just now being critically inquired into, weighed and appraised. Dickens was a man of commanding genius. His observation was acute, and he reproduced with so photographic a fidelity the life and times of his early years that the "manners and customs of the English," during the first third of the nineteenth century, find no such luminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, the _Pickwick Papers_ cease to amuse, they will still afford by far the most valuable evidence that could possibly exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and the conditions of travel, that immediately preceded the railway era. Superficial critics may hold that the most humorous book of the century is but a succession of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot; they may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, Snodgrass, Winkle, and the rest of that glorious company, were "idiots," but for genuine fun and frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the "new humorists," with their theories and criticisms of the "old humour," have approached within a continent or so of it. Not that Dickens' methods were irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his books to give his