The "Bull" inn (how remarkably like its frontage is to that other "Bull" at Dartford) is much the same now as when Dickens wrote of it; only there are portraits of Dickens hanging on the staircase now, and the ball-room, with its "elevated den," is a place of solitude. They still show you the rooms where Winkle and Mr. Pickwick slept, as though they were real people, and so great an affection do the members of the Pickwick Club command, that, while pointing out where Tracy Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass danced, the rooms occupied by the Princess Victoria are clean forgotten. So literature scores a success for once; but I wish a too earnest loyalty had not altered the sign from the "Bull Inn" to the "Victoria and Bull Hotel"! The hall is still "a very grove of dead game and dangling joints of mutton," and the "illustrious larder, with glass doors, developing cold fowls and noble joints and tarts, wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdraws itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a lattice-work of pastry," still whets the appetites of incoming guests, just as though England stood where she did, and as if our trades were not ruined by foreign competition, our industries decayed, the army gone to the dogs, the navy to Davy Jones, the farmer to the workhouse, and the shopkeeper to the Bankruptcy Court, as we are told they have. No doubt all these things have happened, or are in course of fulfilment, and I suppose the hotel-keepers keep up their licences merely for the love of licensed victualling, while the "commercials" still travel the roads for old acquaintance's sake rather than for any business that may be doing. How disinterested of them! XXII I notice that there is a great tendency among those who have to describe Rochester Cathedral to dismiss it with the remarks that it is quite small, and that it was "restored" in 1825 and 1875. These, of course, are the merest ineptitudes of criticism, and if we allowed praise or censure to be awarded according to the bulk, then that hideous elephantine conventicle, Jezreel's Temple, on the summit of Chatham Hill, would easily bear away the bell. But size has little to do with a right appreciation of architecture. Chasteness of proportion, the degree of artistry shown alike in details and in the execution of the whole, are the sole considerations that shall weigh with those who take any sort of an intelligent interest in the architecture of cathedrals; and the admiration of a thing that "licks creation" in the matter of measurement is senseless if it is not wedded to a proper perception of the justness of the parts that go to make its bulk.