k Church 50

Shorne Church 54

The Leather Bottle, Cobham 58

[Illustration]

The central shrine of a literary cult is at least as often its hero's
home of adoption as his place of birth. To the Wordsworthian,
Cockermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere
and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, for all its associations with the life and
the genius of Scott, is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border
country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is
with Dickens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to
Landport in South-sea. The Dickens pilgrim treads in the most palpable
footsteps of "Boz" amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too
rapidly disappearing, and through the "rich and varied landscape" on
either side of the Medway, "covered with cornfields and pastures, with
here and there a windmill or a distant church", which Dickens loved from
boyhood, peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for
his last and most-cherished habitation.

What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to Dickens in his later
years was Gadshill Place. From his study window in the "grave red-brick
house" "on his little Kentish freehold"--a house which he had "added to
and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly
irregular and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas as the
most hopeful man could possibly desire"--he looked out, so he wrote to a
friend, "on as pretty a view as you will find in a long day's English
ride.... Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house; the distant Thames
is in front; the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and
cathedral, on one side." On every side he could not fail to reach, in
those brisk walks with which he sought, too strenuously, perhaps, health
and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature
achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his
brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers
since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter.
On those seven miles between Rochester and Maidstone, which he
discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be
tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a
pleasant old Elizabet