246 



COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



left the world, and silence had fallen on places of 

 divine laughter. So men must have felt, I think, 

 when Rabelais died — Rabelais, the man who first 

 tausrht a monk-ridden world how to shake its sides : 

 so men must have felt, I think, when the day destined 

 for the departure came to Swift and Fielding and Sterne 

 — Sterne so much maligned by Coleridge and Thackeray 

 and others, yet of all his contempbraries the most pro- 

 found, the most misunderstood. Yes, the feeling was 

 general, I think, that English literature had suffered an 



irremediable loss by 

 Dickens's death ; and 

 time has confirmed the 

 fear. We have aban- 

 doned laughter in these 

 days for documentary 

 evidence, psychology, 

 realism, and other pre- 

 scriptions for sleep, and 

 have entered on a liter- 

 ary era which has lost 

 all touch and sym- 

 pathy with Dickens, 

 and is indeed divinely 

 dull. 



The above may ap- 

 pear perhaps in a 

 coaching article, a 

 literary digression, but it is in truth but a resurrection 

 pie of thoughts which occurred to me — and would occur 

 to any real lover of Dickens — in the course of that two 

 mile seven furlong walk on the Dover Road between 

 Gad's Hill and Rochester, which the great author used 

 to cover nearly every other day of his life. For Rochester 

 is as closely associated with Dickens as Chaucer is with 

 Canterbury, or Shakespeare with Stratford-on-Avon. In 

 that great cycle of imaginative prose beginning with the 

 Pickwick Fathers and ending with Edwin Drood^ Roches- 



Staircase in the A'wis' Houses, Rochester. 



