n the letter to Mr. J. Crofton Croker) had
reference to an antiquarian club, called the Noviomagians, who were
about to give a dinner in honour of Sir Edward Belcher and Captain
Kellett, the officers in command of the Arctic Exploring Expedition, to
which Charles Dickens was also invited. Mr. Crofton Croker was the
president of this club, and to denote his office it was customary to put
on a cocked hat after dinner.

The "lost character" he writes of in a letter to Mrs. Watson, refers to
two different decipherings of his handwriting; this sort of study being
in fashion then, and he and his friends at Rockingham Castle deriving
much amusement from it.

The letter dated July 9th was in answer to an anonymous correspondent,
who wrote to him as follows: "I venture to trespass on your attention
with one serious query, touching a sentence in the last number of 'Bleak
House.' Do the supporters of Christian missions to the heathen really
deserve the attack that is conveyed in the sentence about Jo' seated in
his anguish on the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts? The allusion is severe, but is it just? Are
such boys as Jo' neglected? What are ragged schools, town missions, and
many of those societies I regret to see sneered at in the last number of
'Household Words'?"

The "Duke of Middlesex," in the letter we have here to Mr. Charles
Knight, was the name of the character played by Mr. F. Stone, in Sir E.
B. Lytton's comedy of "Not so Bad as we Seem."

Our last letter in this year, to Mr. G. Linnaeus Banks, was in
acknowledgment of one from him on the subject of a proposed public
dinner to Charles Dickens, to be given by the people of Birmingham, when
they were also to present him with a salver and a diamond ring. The
dinner was given in the following year, and the ring and salver (the
latter an artistic specimen of Birmingham ware) were duly presented by
Mr. Banks, who acted as honorary secretary, in the names of the
subscribers, at the rooms of the Birmingham Fine Arts Association. Mr.
Banks, and the artist, Mr. J. C. Walker, were the originators of this
demonstration.

[Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.]

TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 31st, 1852._

MY DEAR MACREADY,

If the "taxes on knowledge" mean the stamp duty, the paper duty, and the
advertisement duty, they seem to me to be unnecessarily confounded, and
unfairly too.

I have already declined