lodged by the landlady out of charity, had anything to bequeath; but the doctor paid over, as executor, the sum of L1000 to Charles Henry Hanger, the son of this eccentric. XXI [Sidenote: ROCHESTER] And so, as Mr. Samuel Pepys might say, into Rochester. Rochester was to Dickens variously "Mudfog," "Great Winglebury," "Dullborough," and "Cloisterham." It cannot be said that any of these names form anything like an adequate word-picture of the place. As names, they vary from good to indifferent, and very bad, but none of them shadow forth the real Rochester, which is rather a busy place than otherwise: none, for instance, are so happily descriptive as that under which a waggish fellow introduced a wealthy distiller to an assemblage of Polish notables--as "Count Caskowisky." I might pluck a feather from Dickens' wing with which to furnish forth a wounding shaft, and say of Rochester, under any of those pseudonyms, as Trabbs' boy said in another connection (and yet not deserve the title of "unlimited miscreant,") "Don't know yah!" The somnolent place which Dickens drew--its High Street a narrow lane, its houses abodes of gloom and mystery--has not much existence in fact. It is, of course, heresy to say so (but it is none the less true), that although no other place was probably so well known to Dickens, and that from his youth upward, yet he never caught the true note of Rochester. That he loved the place seems obvious enough, but his was not the Gothic, mediaeval temperament that could really appreciate it aright. The test of this is found in the fact that although Dickens has written many glowing pages on Rochester, and apparently yielded to none in his admiration for the old city, yet its appearance is far more beautiful to the stranger learned in Dickens-lore than anything he is prepared to see.