The first house to which Mr. Pickwick and his followers--the amorous Tupman, Winkle the sportsman, and the poetic Snodgrass--came at the close of their first day’s travel is still in being. I name the “Bull” at Rochester, which long ago adopted Jingle’s recommendation, and blazoned it on the rather dingy forefront, of grey brick: “Good house--nice beds.” It is still very much as it was when Dickens conferred immortality upon it; only there are now portraits of him and pictures of Pickwickian characters on the walls of the staircase. Still you may find in the hall the “illustrious larder,” rather like a Chippendale book-case, behind whose glass doors the “noble joints and tarts” are still placed--only I think they have not now the nobility or the aldermanic proportions demanded by an earlier generation--and the cold fowls are indubitably there. The “very grove” of dangling uncooked joints is, if one’s memory of such things serves, not as described, in the hall, but depending, as they commonly are made to do in old inns, from hooks in the ceiling of the archway entrance. The custom excites the curiosity of many. To the majority of observers it has seemed to be by way of advertisement of the good cheer within; but the real reason is sufficiently simple: it is to keep the joints fresh and sweet in the current of air generally to be reckoned upon in that situation. The ball-room, with the “elevated den” for musicians at one end, is a real room, and you wonder exceedingly at the smallness, not only of the den, but of the room itself, where the fine flower of Dockyard society gathered and fraternised with the even finer flower of that belonging to the Garrison: the two, joining forces, condescending to, or sneering upon, the vulgar herd of tradesmen and their wives. In this somewhat exiguous apartment Tupman and Jingle danced, and the bellicose Dr. Slammer, of the 97th Regiment, glared; and the society of Chatham and Rochester had, you cannot help thinking, a very close and tightly packed evening. They take their Pickwickian associations very seriously at the “Bull,” which, by the way, is an “inn” no longer, but an “hotel.” In 1836, the Princess Victoria and her mother, travelling to London, were detained by stress of weather that rendered it dangerous to cross the bridge, and they reluctantly stayed at Rochester the night. Who were low-class Pickwickians, that they should stand before such distinction? So the old house for a while took on a new name, and became the “Victoria and Bull,” and then, Royal associations gradually waning and literary landmarks growing more popular, the “Bull and Victoria,” finally, in these last years, revered again to its simple old name. That Royal visit is well-nigh forgotten now, and you are no longer invited to look with awe upon the rooms occupied by those august, indubitably flesh-and-blood travellers; but you _are_ shown the bedrooms of the entirely fictitious Pickwickians.