ening of _Chuzzlewit_--Reading
Tennyson--Theatricals at Margate--A New
Protege--Proposed Dedication--Sea-bathing and
Authorship--Emigrants in Canada--Coming to the
End--Rejected Motto for _Notes_--Return to
London--Cheerless Visit--The Mingled
Yarn--Scene at a Funeral--The Suppressed
Introductory Chapter to the _Notes_, now first
printed--Jeffrey's Opinion of the
_Notes_--Dickens's Experience of America in
1868.

THE reality did not fall short of the anticipation of home. His return
was the occasion of unbounded enjoyment; and what he had planned before
sailing as the way we should meet, received literal fulfilment. By the
sound of his cheery voice I first knew that he was come; and from my
house we went together to Maclise, also "without a moment's warning." A
Greenwich dinner in which several friends (Talfourd, Milnes, Procter,
Maclise, Stanfield, Marryat, Barham, Hood, and Cruikshank among them)
took part, and other immediate greetings, followed; but the most special
celebration was reserved for autumn, when, by way of challenge to what
he had seen while abroad, a home-journey was arranged with Stanfield,
Maclise, and myself for his companions, into such of the most striking
scenes of a picturesque English county as the majority of us might not
before have visited: Cornwall being ultimately chosen.

Before our departure he was occupied by his preparation of the _American
Notes_; and to the same interval belongs the arrival in London of Mr.
Longfellow, who became his guest, and (for both of us I am privileged to
add) our attached friend. Longfellow's name was not then the pleasant
and familiar word it has since been in England; but he had already
written several of his most felicitous pieces, and he possessed all the
qualities of delightful companionship, the culture and the charm, which
have no higher type or example than the accomplished and genial
American. He reminded me, when lately again in England, of two
experiences out of many we had enjoyed together this quarter of a
century before. One of them was a day at Rochester, when, met by one of
those prohibitions which are the wonder of visitors and the shame of
Englishmen, we overleapt gates and barriers, and, setting at defiance
repeated threats of all the terrors of law coarsely expressed to us by
the custodian of the place, explored minutely the castle ruins. The
other was a n