2 THE DOVER ROAD 



nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and 

 Normans people the streets of tlie old towns throngh 

 which the highway takes its course, or crowd in 

 warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, 

 nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great 

 blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and 

 ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up 

 before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the 

 record of their doings Avould occupy ; in fine, the 

 wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand 

 years combine to intimidate the historian. 



How rich, then, the road in material, and how 

 embarrassing the accumulated wealth of twenty 

 centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest 

 justice in this one volume ! Many volumes and bulky 

 should go toward the telling of this story ; and for the 

 proper presentation of its pageantry, for the due 

 setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, 

 upon these seventy miles of highwa}^, the rugged- 

 wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of 

 Thomas Hardy's rustic tragedies, the sly humour and 

 the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added 

 to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To 

 these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn 

 of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command 

 one might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of 

 the Dover Road ; while, with the aid of pictorial genius 

 like that possessed by those masters of their art, 

 Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be 

 fashioned that would shadow fortli the life and scenery 

 of the wayside to the admiration of all. Without 

 these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all 

 this subject demands, nor how sufliciently narrate 

 within the compass of these covers the doings of sixty 

 generations ? 



The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with 

 our journej^ is measured from the south side of 

 London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters 

 of a mile long. 



