In this power of physical evocation of the bodiless beings of the brain, Dickens alone can stand beside the great French master; and after him I know of only two writers of modern romance who possess, in any comparable degree, this vividness of portraiture which makes their creations living, moving beings to themselves as to us: Turgénieff, and Henry Kingsley in his early and fresh work. To not one of these, it is probable,—not even to the great Balzac,had his own creations such distinct and insistent personality as those of Dickens to himself. They were, as he once said, a part of himself "gone out into the shadowy world," and, having separate existence, thenceforth never left him. He had entire belief in their reality, and would stop in his walks to hold conversations and play pranks with them. Above all, he suffered most acutely in their sufferings. Some one has well said that no human being could really suffer as Dickens sometimes thought that he suffered. His feeling was too intense to be profound or lasting. And it is singular that, while he sympathized so acutely with the fictitious sufferings of his own creation, he did not show, in written words at least, any such intensity of feeling for the trials of his own boyhood. He could turn them to dramatic account and coin them into serviceable scenes. Yet none of the children of his brain were more forlorn and friendless than he; no childhood of his invention was more sad and dramatic than his own. But it is noticeable that on the few occasions on which he speaks of these early scenes, in his narration of it to Forster,-in an allusion in a letter to Washington Irving, he is singularly temperate and self-contained: in striking contrast to the ease with which he becomes lachrymose over Paul Dombey, maudlin over Little Dorrit, or breaks into blank verse over the privations and death of Little Nell. "I cannot help it when I am very much in earnest," he writes of this tendency. Perhaps he was too much in earnest in his own case to sentimentalize or "drop into poetry over it; and certainly nothing he ever wrote has less of shallow sentimentality in it than his account of his own "small and not over-particularly caredfor boyhood"-nothing more genuinely pathetic than his references to the "never-tobe-forgotten misery of that time."

These scenes of his boyhood, which are also those of David Copperfield's early London life, have the greatest interest for us, but it is no longer possible to trace

them. The blacking-warehouse at Old Hungerford Stairs, Strand, opposite Old Hungerford Market, in which he tied up the pots of blacking in company with Bob Fagin (whose name he "took the liberty of using long afterward in 'Oliver Twist'") and Poll Green (whose first name he "transferred, long afterward again, to Mr. Sweedlepipe"), has long since been torn down. That "crazy old house, with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats," is now replaced by a row of stone buildings; the embankment has risen over the mud; and the vast Charing Cross Station stands opposite, on the site of the old Hungerford Market and of "The Swan, or The Swan and something else"-the miserable old "public" where he used to get his bread and cheese and glass of beer. The very name of the street is gone, and Villiers street has sponged out the memory of Hungerford Stairs.

The "two old-fashioned shops" in Chandos street, next to the corner of Bedford street, to which the blacking-warehouse was afterward removed, and in front of which people used to stop to admire his and Bob Fagin's briskness at their work,are replaced by the massive coöperative stores; and the little public-house where he got his ale, on the opposite side of the street, and of which he writes, "the stones in the street may be smoothed by my small feet going across to it at dinnertime, and back again,"-this, too, is swept away. Indeed, it is no longer possible to find any of the places he makes mention of in his narrative to Forster: there are no traces of the two pudding-shops between which he was divided according to his finances, nor of the à la mode beef shop where he once magnificently dined, nor of the coffee-shops at which, when he had money, he took his half-pint of coffee and slice of bread and butter. When he had no money, he used to take a turn in Covent Garden Market and stare at the pine-apples for his dinner; and this refreshment is still open to us. But the Adelphi arches, the hiding and sleeping place of tramps and outcasts, which he loved to explore, have been transformed by gas, and policemen, and other modern improvements; Bayham street, where he lived, is entirely rebuilt-(singularly enough, a tavern on its corner is kept by one Dickens); his school-house, in Mornington Place, was long since half sliced

away when the London and North-western Railway entered London. And the tipsy book-seller in Hampstead Road, to whom he used to sell his father's books, who knows what has become of him and his little shop? The very streets through which Mr. Micawber guided young Copperfield to his new home in Windsor Terrace are changed beyond all recognition.

There is, indeed, but one spot in all London toward which we can turn now with the assurance of finding any traces of those days. The Borough, Southwark, still con

"it is gone now, and the world is none the worse for it." He may have meant that it no longer existed as a debtor's prison, or he may have believed, at the time of writing, that it had really been torn down; but before the termination of the story he had discovered that it still stood there, as he tells us in the preface to the completed volume. Taking him for our guide, let us stroll out for a visit to it on this sunny September morning.

Southwark, or, as it is commonly called, the Borough, lies on the southern or Surrey

tains the two buildings which we should, | perhaps, of all others have selected for preservation, the Marshalsea, no less filled with memories of young Dickens than of Little Dorrit; and near to it-for he could not live in the prison with his father-his lodgings, "at the house of the Insolvent Court agent, who lived in Lant street, in the Borough, where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterward." It has been repeated over and over-respectable guidebooks continue to state-that the old prison no longer exists. This error may have been caused by the statement he makes in introducing the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit":

side of the Thames, and we may cross to it from where we start on this northern side by almost any of its bridges, and still walk with Dickens. We may cross by Westminster Bridge, as he did one evening when he had been somewhere for his father, and was going back to the Borough by that route. It was on this evening that he went into the public-house in Parliament street, near the bridge, and astounded the landlord and his wife-so small he was-by demanding "a glass of his best,-his VERY best,-his Genuine Stunning Ale, with a good head to it!" He tells this story of David Copperfield, but it really happened to him. This

Passing up the High street of the Borough

Or we may follow the boy's usual course "home"-as he called the prison-at night, across Blackfriar's Bridge," and down that turning in the Blackfriar's Road which has the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop-door" on one corner. This turning was Little Charlotte street, leading to Union street, and the sign-but newly gilt and gorgeous nowis still to be seen there as an ironmonger's sign. Or we may cross by Southwark Bridge, the iron bridge of which Little Dorrit was so fond, because it was "as quiet after the roaring streets as if it had been open country." It was a toll-bridge in those days, and for that reason less frequented than the free bridges. To this bridge, "young John Chivery" followed "followed Little Dorrit on that baleful Sunday when he attempted his modest declaration of love, with such small measure of success that we who wish him well-regret the more to see so soon after, on this same bridge, her evident readiness to bestow her confidence and her affection on that lugubrious bore, Arthur Clennam.

And, while here, we cannot forget that it was on this black stretch of water below us, "between Southwark Bridge, which is of iron, and London Bridge, which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in," that we first saw Lizzie Hexam, rowing her father's boat, while Gaffer sat in the stern and steered," and kept an eager lookout." And so, still going down the river, we come at last to cross by London Bridge, there following the footsteps of Nancy, dogged by Noah Claypole, to the steps on the Surrey side. This, too, was the lounging-place of young Dickens, on those mornings when he was out from his lodgings betimes, too early for admission to the Marshalsea for his breakfast; and where he used to tell "quite astonishing fictions about the wharves and the Tower" to their little maid-of-all-work, on her morning way to the prison, she also lodging outside. It was this "orphan girl of the Chatham work-house, from whose sharp little worldly and also kindly ways he took his first impression of the Marchioness in The Old Curiosity Shop.""

Dickens's London, or London in the Works of Charles Dickens, by T. Edgar Pemberton.

led us-past the White Hart of Sam Weller and Jack Cade, and the other famous old taverns, the George, the Spur, the Queen's Head, the King's Head,-we reach, at the end of the street, just on the hither side of St. George's church, a cheese-and-butter shop, into the back part of which the proprietor courteously allows us to enter. We stand in the former turnkey's-lodge of the Marshalsea, unchanged, except for the shop built in front of it, since the days when young Dickens and Little Dorrit crept through it, in and out, at night and morning; both about of a size, both equally forlorn. We seem to see Mr. Chivery "on the lock" to-day, and "young John," having set his dinner down, is entirely oblivious that it is growing stone-cold, in his mute adoration of the movements of Little Dorrit in the yard within, whom he is gazing on with his eye glued to the key-hole of the lodge-door,-that eye which, by constant employment in this laudable duty, has become swollen and enlarged beyond the other one.

Going out again from the shop into the street, we find, a few feet lower down, a narrow archway under the houses, on the side of which, in half-effaced black letters, on an alleged white ground, we read, “Angel Place, leading to Bermondsey." Let the visitor pass through this archway into Marshalsea Place just within, and he "will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered, if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived: and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years."

As we stand in the court, we have before us the right-hand yard, the little prison for smugglers at its farther end, and that side of the debtor's prison in which the Dickens family lived; the windows nearest, in the top story but one, are those of their rooms, which he has made, also, the rooms of Mr. Dorrit. The windows above look into the room occupied by Captain Porter and his queer family, of whom the boy borrowed the extra knife and fork. This block of buildings is backed by a similar block, the windows of which look out also on the yard, which runs completely around the barracklike pile. It is now what we should call a cheap tenement-house, and has a squalid and