ity of Dickens'
genius, and next on the conditions under which Dickens studied London.
If every book be a part of its writer's autobiography I invite the
youthful author who now passes his evenings in swapping views about
Art with his fellow cockneys to pause and reflect if he is indeed
treading in Dickens' footsteps or stands in any path likely to lead
him to results such as Dickens achieved.

EXCURSIONISTS IN POETRY

Nov. 5, 1892. An Itinerary.

Besides the glorious exclusiveness of it, there is a solid advantage
just now, in not being an aspirant for the Laureateship. You can go
out into the wilderness for a week without troubling to leave an
address. A week or so back I found with some difficulty a friend who
even in his own judgment has no claim to the vacant office, and we set
out together across Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quantocks, by eccentric
paths over the southern ranges of Wales to the Wye, and homewards by
canoe between the autumn banks of that river. The motto of the voyage
was Verlaine's line--

"Et surtout ne parlons pas litterature"

--especially poetry. I think we felt inclined to congratulate each
other after passing the Quantocks in heroic silence; but were content
to read respect in each other's eyes.

The Return to Literature.

On our way home we fell across a casual copy of the _Globe_
newspaper, and picked up a scrap of information about the Blorenge, a
mountain we had climbed three days before. It is (said the _Globe_)
the only thing in the world that rhymes with orange. From this we
inferred that the Laureate had not been elected during our wanderings,
and that the Anglo-Saxon was still taking an interest in poetry. It
was so.

Public Excursions in Verse.

The progress of this amusing epidemic may be traced in the _Times_.
It started mildly and decorously with the death of a politician. The
writer of Lord Sherbrooke's obituary notice happened to remember and
transcribe the rather flat epigram beginning--

"Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe,
Where he's gone to I don't know...."

with Lowe's own Latin translation of the same. At once the _Times_ was
flooded with other versions by people who remembered the lines more or
less imperfectly, who had clung each to his own version since
childhood, who doubted if the epigram were originally written on Lord
Sherbrooke, who had seen it on an eighteenth-century tombstone in
several parts of England, and so on. London Co