ROCHESTER 103 



shaft, and say of Rochester, under any of those 

 pseudonyms, as Trabbs' boy said in another connection 

 (and vet not deserve the title of " unhmited miscreant,") 

 " Don't know yah ! " 



The somnolent place which Dickens drew — its 

 High Street a narrow lane, its houses abodes of gloom 

 and mystery — has not much existence in fact. It is, 

 of course, heresy to say so (but it is none the less true), 

 that although no other place was probably so well 

 known to Dickens, and that from his youth upward, 

 yet he never caught the true note of Rochester. That 

 he loved the place seems obvious enough, but his was 

 not the Gothic, mediaeval temperament that could 

 really appreciate it aright. The test of this is found in 

 the fact that although Dickens has written many 

 glowing pages on Rochester, and apparenth^ yielded to 

 none in his admiration for the old city, yet its appear- 

 ance is far more beautiful to the stranger learned in 

 Dickens-lore than anything he is prepared to see. 



Busy, beautiful Rochester, and none the less 

 beautiful because busy. The traveller who first sees 

 the old place, its castle and cathedral and the turbid 

 Medway, from Strood, is fortunate in his approach, 

 and will never forget the grand picture it makes. 

 To his right stretches away for miles the broad valley 

 of the Medway, with bold hills crowned with windmills, 

 above, and the stream, diminishing in long perspective, 

 below ; ^\dth jutting promontories where the factory- 

 chimneys of Borstal and Wouldham stand up, clustered 

 like the stalks of monstrous vegetables, and the red- 

 sailed barges that drop down with wind and tide. 

 Before him rise the great keep, the cathedral, and the 

 clustered red roofs of the cit^^ with a glimpse of the 

 High Street, the Town Hall and its great vane — a 

 full-rigged ship — at the other end of the bridge. 

 And all the while to his left is the shrieking and the 

 screaming of the trains, rolling in thunder over the two 

 railway bridges that absolutely shut out and ruin the 

 view down the stream. The bustle, roar, and rattle of 



