ion, but he would have
hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop--"Only
man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he
wrote:--

"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and
breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed,
before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly
able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that
the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat,
is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves
along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and
finally."

The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the
pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and
other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the
river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower
of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of
Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that
"lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed
master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that
the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved
as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which
commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation
Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was
Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has
had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and
beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its
latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and
pillared chimneys. In the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of
Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill
Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in
order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and
do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to _Oliver
Twist_, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is
portrayed.

At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached
of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in
the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's