treet, not, as is popularly supposed,
named for Doctor Johnson, though inhabited by him in 1766, from whence he
removed in the same year to Bolt Court, still keeping to his beloved Fleet
Street), and through an oaken doorway, with a yawning letter-box, there
fell the MS. of a sketch entitled "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," afterward
renamed "Mr. Minns and His Cousin," These were the offices of the old
_Monthly Magazine_ now defunct. Here the article duly appeared as one of
the "Sketches by Boz." In the preface to an edition of "Pickwick,"
published in 1847, Dickens describes the incident sufficiently graphically
for one to realize, to its fullest extent, with what pangs, and hopes, and
fears his trembling hand deposited the first of the children of his brain;
a foundling upon the doorstep where it is to be feared so many former and
later orphans were, if not actually deserted, abandoned to their fate.

These were parlous times in Grub Street; in the days when the art of
letters, though undeniably prolific, was not productive of an income which
would assure even a practised hand freedom from care and want. Within a
half-mile on either side of this blind alley leading off Fleet Street,
from Ludgate Hill on the east--redolent of memories of the Fleet, its
Prison, and its "Marriages"--to Somerset House on the west, is that
unknown land, that _terra incognita_, whereon so many ships of song are
stranded, or what is more, lost to oblivion which is blacker than darkness
itself.

In January, 1837, while still turning out "Pickwick" in monthly parts,
Dickens was offered the editorship of the already famous _Bentley's
Magazine_, which he accepted, and also undertook to write "Oliver Twist"
for the same periodical.

In March, of the same year, the three rooms at Furnival's Inn presumably
having become crowded beyond comfort, he removed with his wife to his
former lodgings at Chalk, where the couple had spent their honeymoon, and
where in the following year their son Charles was born.

What memories are conjured up of the past and, it is to be hoped, of
future greatness by those who, in taking their walks abroad, find
themselves within the confines of the parish of St. Bride's, with its
church built by Wren shortly after the great fire, and its queer pointed
steeple, like a series of superimposed tabourets overtopped with a
needle-like spire?

Here the brazen chimes ring out to all and sundry of the world of
journalism and letters,