od-looking,
and held his head up when he walked, and had what
you may call Fire about him. He wrote poetry, and
he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he
danced, and he acted, and he done it all equally
beautiful. . . . He was a gentleman that had a will
of his own and a eye of his own, and that would be
minded."

Perfectly true do we find the summing up of his character, in his home
at Gad's Hill, as given by Professor Minto in the last edition of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (one of the most faithful, just, and
appreciative articles ever written about Dickens):--"Here he worked, and
walked, and saw his friends, and was loved and almost worshipped by his
poorer neighbours, for miles around."

Although tolerably familiar with most of the writings of Dickens from
our youth, and, like many readers, having our favourites which may have
absorbed our attention to the exclusion of others, we are bound to say
that our little visit to Rochester and its neighbourhood--our
"Dickens-Land"--rendered famous all the world over in the novels and
minor works, gives a freshness, a brightness, and a reality to our
conceptions scarcely expected, and never before experienced. The
faithful descriptions of scenery witnessed by us for the first time in
and about the "quaint city" of Rochester, the delightful neighbourhood
of Cobham, the glorious old city of Canterbury, the dreary marshes and
other localities: the more detailed pictures of particular places, like
the Castle, the Cathedral, its crypt and tower, the Bull Inn, the Vines,
Richard Watts's Charity, and others--the point of the situation in many
of these cannot be realized without personal inspection and
verification.

And further, as by a sort of reflex action, another feeling comes
uppermost in our minds, apart from the mere amusement and enjoyment of
Dickens's works: we mean the actual benefits to humanity which, directly
or indirectly, arise out of his writings; and we endorse the noble lines
of dedication which his friend, Walter Savage Landor, addressed to him
in his _Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans_ (1853):--

"Friends as we are, have long been, and ever shall be, I doubt whether I
should have prefaced these pages with your name, were it not to register
my judgment that, in breaking up and cultivating the unreclaimed wastes
of Humanity, no labours have been so strenuous, so continuous