A beautiful sundial was erected at Abbotsford by Sir Walter Scott, and all over the country are found dials of various ages and designs, built by the orders of great and learned men, to be a guide and also a memorial through years to come. It was Charles Dickens who, in June, 1859, wrote to his daughter and signified his pleasure at receiving from the contractor for the works, the gift of a balustrade out of the old Rochester bridge; he stated that without delay he had had a dial constructed to suit the pedestal, and thus had added to his garden a fresh item of interest. All forms of dials have received consideration—perpendicular, horizontal, pocket and ring dials; even moon dials have not been neglected. Thomas Fale, in his book on “The Art of Dialling,” published in 1593, gives a chapter to “the making of a dial, to know the houre by the moon;”—while it is certain that portable cylinder dials were in common use in England as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. Lydgate, who wrote, about the year 1430, the “storie of Thebes, an additional Canterbury tale,” which was printed with Chaucer’s works in 1651, writes as if a dial were commonly carried by travellers. He says:— “Passed ye thrope of Boughton on the Blee: By my kalendar I gan anon to see Through the sonne that full clear gan shine, Of the clock that it drew to nine.” And Warton gives us a note on the word “kalendar.” “Chilindre, a cylinder, a kind of pocket sundial.” Many pocket dials of great beauty, dating from the middle of the 17th century, are in existence, and, although rare; ivory, silver, brass, and bone dials of the Stuart period can still be secured from dealers for reasonable sums. But, like most rarities, they will doubtless soon be bought up and find their way into museums or the collections of the rich. How early a date may be fixed for the pocket dial in England cannot be determined. Nicholas Kratzer, styled the Deviser of Horologies to King Henry VIII. of England, certainly left us pocket dials of his age, for in Cardinal Wolsey’s dial made by him we have a fair specimen of his art. Sixteenth-century pocket dials were made in France, Germany, and Italy, and although they were of different shapes and sizes, the general construction of “ye horologe” was the same. In the British Museum, which is nowhere equalled as a public collection, can be seen a great number of portable dials.