clock (their luggage they
had directed to be forwarded to the city, from Rochester), and being
fortunate enough to secure places on the outside of a coach, arrived in
London in sound health and spirits, on that same afternoon.

The next three or four days were occupied with the preparations which
were necessary for their journey to the borough of Eatanswill. As
any references to that most important undertaking demands a separate
chapter, we may devote the few lines which remain at the close of
this, to narrate, with great brevity, the history of the antiquarian
discovery.

It appears from the Transactions of the Club, then, that Mr. Pickwick
lectured upon the discovery at a General Club Meeting, convened on the
night succeeding their return, and entered into a variety of ingenious
and erudite speculations on the meaning of the inscription. It also
appears that a skilful artist executed a faithful delineation of the
curiosity, which was engraven on stone, and presented to the Royal
Antiquarian Society, and other learned bodies: that heart-burnings and
jealousies without number were created by rival controversies which were
penned upon the subject; and that Mr. Pickwick himself wrote a pamphlet,
containing ninety-six pages of very small print, and twenty-seven
different readings of the inscription: that three old gentlemen cut off
their eldest sons with a shilling a-piece for presuming to doubt the
antiquity of the fragment; and that one enthusiastic individual cut
himself off prematurely, in despair at being unable to fathom its
meaning: that Mr. Pickwick was elected an honorary member of seventeen
native and foreign societies, for making the discovery: that none of the
seventeen could make anything of it; but that all the seventeen agreed
it was very extraordinary.

Mr. Blotton, indeed--and the name will be doomed to the undying contempt
of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime--Mr. Blotton, we
say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to
state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with
a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick,
actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return,
sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the
man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man presumed the
stone to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity of the
inscription--inasmuch as he represente