“So this is where Mr. Pickwick is supposed to have slept?” remarked a visitor, when viewing bedroom No. 17 by favour of a former landlord. That stranger meant no offence, but the landlord was greatly ruffled. “_Supposed_ to have slept? He _did_ sleep here, sir!” “O ye verities!” as Carlyle might have exclaimed. [Illustration: THE “BULL,” ROCHESTER.] Many Dickens commentators have long cherished what Horace Walpole might have styled a “historic doubt” as to what house was that one in Rochester referred to by Jingle as Wright’s. “Wright’s, next house, dear--very dear--half a crown in the bill if you look at the waiter--charge you more if you dine at a friend’s than they would if you dined in the coffee-room--rum fellows--very.” But “Wright’s” really was the next “house”--house, that is to say, in the colloquial sense, by which “public-house” is understood, and not by any means next door. There is every excuse for writers on Dickens-land going wrong here, for the real name of the old house to which Wright came, somewhere about 1820, and on which he imposed his own was the “Crown.” The old “Crown” fronted on to the High Street, and was one of those old galleried inns already mentioned so plentifully in these pages. It claimed to have been built in 1390, and its yard was not only the spot where, unknown to all save his intimates, Henry the Eighth had his first peep at his intended consort Anne of Cleves, whom that disappointed connoisseur in feminine beauty immediately styled a “Flanders mare”; but was in all probability the original of the inn-yard in _Henry the Fourth_, whence Shakespeare’s flea-bitten carriers with their razes of ginger and other goods for London, sleepless probably on account of those uncovenanted co-partners of their beds, set forth, by starlight, yawning, with much talk of highway dangers. At the “Crown” too, once stayed no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth; while some two centuries later Hogarth and his fellow-roysterers stayed a night in the house, on their “Frolic” down Thames. [Illustration: ROCHESTER IN PICKWICKIAN DAYS, SHOWING THE OLD BRIDGE AND “WRIGHT’S.”]