and publish all Dickens's works; and
they estimate that two million copies of _Pickwick_[1] have been sold in
England alone, exclusive of the almost innumerable popular editions,
from one penny upwards, published by other firms, the copyright of this
work having expired. The penny edition was sold by hundreds of thousands
in the streets of London some years ago.

This statement will probably be surprising to the remarkable class of
readers thus described by that staunch admirer of Dickens, Mr. Andrew
Lang, in "Phiz," one of his charming _Lost Leaders_. He says:--

"It is a singular and gloomy feature in the character of young ladies
and gentlemen of a particular type, that they have ceased to care for
Dickens, as they have ceased to care for Scott. They say they cannot
read Dickens. When Mr. Pickwick's adventures are presented to the modern
maid, she behaves like the Cambridge freshman. 'Euclide viso, cohorruit
et evasit.' When he was shown Euclid he evinced dismay, and sneaked off.
Even so do most young people act when they are expected to read
_Nicholas Nickleby_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_. They call these
master-pieces 'too gutterly gutter'; they cannot sympathize with this
honest humour and conscious pathos. Consequently the innumerable
references to Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Mr. Pecksniff, and Mr.
Winkle, which fill our ephemeral literature, are written for these
persons in an unknown tongue. The number of people who could take a good
pass in Mr. Calverley's _Pickwick_ Examination Paper is said to be
diminishing. Pathetic questions are sometimes put. Are we not too much
cultivated? Can this fastidiousness be anything but a casual passing
phase of taste? Are all people over thirty who cling to their Dickens
and their Scott old fogies? Are we wrong in preferring them to _Bootles'
Baby_, and _The Quick or the Dead_, and the novels of M. Paul Bourget?"

[Illustration: Fountain Court, Temple.]

But this by the way. Turning down Essex Street, we visit the Temple,
celebrated in several of Dickens's novels--_Barnaby Rudge_, _A Tale of
Two Cities_, _Great Expectations_, and _Our Mutual Friend_,--but in none
more graphically than in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in which is described the
fountain in Fountain Court, where Ruth Pinch goes to meet her lover,
"coming briskly up, with the best little laugh upon her face that ever
played in opposition to the fountain; and beat it all to nothing." And
when John Westlock came at last, "