appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's
as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles
Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....

"That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
sure enough-stood up on end."

The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is
not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
Clemens, in September, he wrote:

Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word
once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to
spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough
with work.

In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to
have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the
spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He felt
that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just
begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his
mother and sister, in November, he wrote:

I came here to take n