That the balustrade was not very greatly to be relied upon, and that Mr. Pickwick, bulky man as he was, ran a considerable risk when he leaned over the parapet, may be gathered when we read that on a night in 1836 a storm demolished a great stretch of it, and that the Princess Victoria, who was coming up the road from Dover, was content to be advised to stay overnight at the "Bull," rather than attempt to cross over to Strood. The riverside wore a somewhat different aspect then. Low and broken cliffs picturesquely shelved down to the water's edge where a neat embankment now runs, and the balustrades of the old bridge serve their old purpose on this new river-wall. The embankment is an improvement from an utilitarian point of view, but its long straight line hurts the artistic sense. The stranger should come into Rochester preferably on the evening of a summer's day, and, as first impressions must ever remain the most distinct, he should walk in over the bridge. At such times a golden haze spreads over the city and the river, and renders both a dream of beauty. The gilt ship on the Town Hall blazes like molten metal; the "moon-faced clock" of the Corn Exchange is correspondingly calm, and the wide entrance-halls of the older inns begin to glow with light. You should have walked a good fifteen miles or more on the day of your first coming into Rochester, and then you will appreciate aright the mellow comforts of its old inns. But not at once will the connoisseur of antiquity and first impressions who thus enters the old city repair him to his inn. He will turn into the Cathedral precincts underneath the archway of Chertsey's Gate, and I hope he will not already have read _Edwin Drood_, because an acquaintance with that tale quite spoils one's Rochester, and leaves an ineffaceable mark of a modern sordid tragedy upon the hoary stones of Cathedral, Castle, and Close. It is as though one had come to the place after reading the unrelieved brutality of a newspaper report. Rochester demands a romance of the Ivanhoe type; chivalry or necessities of State should have ennobled slaughter here, but a tale of secret murder for private ends vulgarises and tarnishes the place, especially when it is told with all Dickens' wealth of local allusion. He had no comprehension of tragedy and romance other than those of the street and the police-court; which is to say that he had better have left Rochester alone, so far as the _Mystery of Edwin Drood_ is concerned.