oliloquised Francesca;
"and isn't it odd that the long thanksgivings in our country must all
have been for having successfully run away from the Gunpowder Treason,
King Charles the Martyr, and the Restituted Royal Family; yet here we
are, you and I, the best of friends, talking it all over."

As we jog along, or walk, by turns, we come to Buckingham Street,
and looking up at Alfred Jingle's lodgings say a grateful word of Mr.
Pickwick. We tell each other that much of what we know of London and
England seems to have been learned from Dickens.

Deny him the right to sit among the elect, if you will; talk of his
tendency to farce and caricature; call his humour low comedy, and
his pathos bathos--although you shall say none of these things in my
presence unchallenged; the fact remains that every child, in America
at least, knows more of England--its almshouses, debtors' prisons, and
law-courts, its villages and villagers, its beadles and cheap-jacks and
hostlers and coachmen and boots, its streets and lanes, its lodgings and
inns and landladies and roastbeef and plum-pudding, its ways, manners,
and customs,--knows more of these things and a thousand others from
Dickens's novels than from all the histories, geographies, biographies,
and essays in the language. Where is there another novelist who has so
peopled a great city with his imaginary characters that there is hardly
room for the living population, as one walks along the ways?

O these streets of London! There are other more splendid shades in
them,--shades that have been there for centuries, and will walk beside
us so long as the streets exist. One can never see these shades, save
as one goes on foot, or takes that chariot of the humble, the omnibus. I
should like to make a map of literary London somewhat after Leigh
Hunt's plan, as projected in his essay on the World of Books; for to the
book-lover 'the poet's hand is always on the place, blessing it.' One
can no more separate the association from the particular spot than one
can take away from it any other beauty.

'Fleet Street is always Johnson's Fleet Street' (so Leigh Hunt says);
'the Tower belongs to Julius Caesar, and Blackfriars to Suckling,
Vandyke, and the Dunciad...I can no more pass through Westminster
without thinking of Milton, or the Borough without thinking of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, or Gray's Inn without calling Bacon to mind, or
Bloomsbury Square without Steele and Akenside, than I can prefer
b