MEMORIALS OF OLI) KENT.*
WE are not at all clear in our mind as to what purpose the series to which this portly and weighty volume belongs is designed to fulfil. Each volume contains some dozen essays on points historical, social, and archaeological: each is the work of a syndicate of writers. However well done, they must remain merely a kind of swollen magazine, lacking the • Memorials of Old Kent. Edited by P. H. Ditchiteld, H.9_, F.S.A... and George Clinch, F.0.9. London: Bemrose and Sone. [rya. net.] unity that one patient ,author would give, and, to our mind, being far less readable than some of the county monographs which of late years have multiplied so freely. When a book has scientific thoroughness we do not urge readableness as a necessary quality ; but when a book, as in the present case, is a series of personal and superficial essays, then by its readableness it stands or falls. In Memorials of Old Seat we find much good work, but taken as a whole it is unwieldy and fills no void.
For what is perhaps the most interesting paper of all, Canon Benham's notes on the association of Dickens with the Garden of England, the title has to some extent baen abandoned ; for we suppose that originally the editors meant "old Kent" to mean mediaeval Kent, Dickens has been followed through Kent often enough before, but never more attractively than by the genial "Peter Lombard." There is first-hand evidence in it too, to add to its importance. Here, for example, is Canon Benham on Muggleton
"The identification of Muggleton with any town on the map I hold to be an impossibility. It certainly is not Maidstone, for the incidents of the journey will not fit. It is evident to me that Dickens did not mean it to be identified, though it is possible, as his son suggested, that he may have had Town Mailing in his mind for a few of the details. So with Dingley Dell; it might be a dozen places, a typical English yeoman's hospitable home. Local tradition is strong for Cobtree Hall, near Aylesford. There are features within and without the house which correspond with the description. And it is even averred that a Mr. William Spong, who died in 1839 and was buried in Aylesford Churchyard, was Wardle. In Rainham Churchyard is a wooden rail over the grave of Job Baldwin. The local doctor once told me that this was the original of Sam Weller. I asked Charles Dickens the younger about it, and he replied that he had heard it, but he could not say whether it was true. Sam Weller said that Job was the only name he knew that hadn't got a nickname to it.' I have sometimes thought that at any rate Dickens had heard that dictum from Job Baldwin."
With David Copperfield we come to Canterbury, and here Canon Benham makes other old or new identifications :— " I am not so sure about Dr. Strong's. There is no school which would answer to this, and Dickens evidently meant to make it all vague. Some accounts say it was a house in Burgate Street. In my own imagination I have always identified it with the Deanery, and many and many a time have imagined the old doctor walking in the Deanery garden reading the dictionary to the enraptured Mr. Dick. The hotel at which the latter put up when he came over on his periodical visits to David was the Fountain.' David's school days at Canterbury, I need not say, have no correapondence with Dickens's, though the book is in a great degree auto-
biographical The ' little inn' at which Mr. Micawber gave his choice dinner to David is the Sun' just off Memory Lane. The mean house of 1Jriah Heap and his mother, a low, old-fashioned room, entered straight from the street,' is in a lane on the south side of Castle Street."
The paper is charmingly written, and cannot be overlooked by any future critic of the novels. It suggests also what a pleasant book on the great novelist Canon Benham himself might write. Incidentally we quote his opinion of the mystery of Edwin Drood, since that has lately been much before the public. "I have no doubt," he says, "after long reflection, that the solution of the mystery has been found by Mr. Crouch, —namely, that Jasper murdered Edwin, and that Datchery is Helena Landless."
A number of Kentish castles are reviewed by Mr. Harold Sands, Mr. Ditchfield reserving for himself Hever. His picture of Anne Boleyn is a pretty one, but we doubt if the castle ever " echoed to anxious whisperings " when she was ill. Of Mr. Astor's renovation of this castle and transformation of it and its grounds Mr. Backfield has something to Bay. Few attempts to recapture the past have been so drastic, involving an immense outlay, the continuous employment of many hundred men for some years, the diversion of the road, the making of a new bridge (a very beautiful one) and a lake of fifty acres, and so forth. Under the walls of the castle has now sprung up a Tudor village of many houses all under one roof. Everything has in fact been done that money and ingenuity could do to recreate the sixteenth century ; but not so successfully, let us hope, as to induce the ghost of Henry VIII. to haunt it.
The paper on "Romney Marsh in the Days of Smuggling," by the other editor, is slight, and might well have gone farther. The inland smuggling-houses of Kent deserve attention the lonely farms, with enormous secret callarage, where the " run " goods were hidden on their way to the London market. Just at the present time, with Puck of Pock's Hill in our heads, we have but one thought in connexion with Romney Marsh—the flitting of the fairies to Mr. Clinch's article. For the rest, the book has a good paper on " Historic Kent," by Mr. Ditchfield ; "St. Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury," by Mr. Sebastian Evans ; "Mediaeval Rood-Lofts and Screens," by Mr. Aymer Valiance ; and "Refugee Industries in Kent," by Mr. S. W. Kershaw. The name of Philip Sidney as the author of the description of Penshurst gives one a pleasurable thrill, which is not, however, justified.
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