not to note, that among his friends were included nearly all those who by any stretch of fancy could be regarded as his rivals in the fields of humour and fiction.  With Washington Irving, Hood, Douglas Jerrold, Lord Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, and, save for a passing foolish quarrel, with Thackeray, the novelist who really was his peer, he maintained the kindliest and most cordial relations.  Nor when George Eliot published her first books, “The Scenes of Clerical Life” and “Adam Bede,” did any one acknowledge their excellence more freely.  Petty jealousies found no place in the nature of this great writer.

It was also while living at Doughty Street that he seems, in great measure, to have formed those habits of work and relaxation which every artist fashions so as to suit his own special needs and idiosyncrasies.  His favourite time for work was the morning, between the hours of breakfast and lunch; and though, at this particular period, the enormous pressure of his engagements compelled him to work “double tides,” and often far into the night, yet he was essentially a day-worker, not a night-worker.  Like the great German poet Goethe, he preferred to exercise his art in the fresh morning hours, when the dewdrops, as it were, lay bright upon his imagination and fancy.  And for relaxation and sedative, when he had thoroughly worn himself out with mental toil, he would have recourse to the hardest bodily exercise.  At first riding seems to have contented him—­fifteen miles out and fifteen miles in, with a halt at some road-side inn for refreshment.  But soon walking took the place of riding, and he became an indefatigable pedestrian.  He would think nothing of a walk of twenty or thirty miles, and that not merely in the vigorous heyday of youth, but afterwards, to the very last.  He was always on those alert, quick feet of his, perambulating London from end to end, and in every direction; perambulating the suburbs, perambulating the “greater London” that lies within a radius of twenty miles, round the central core of metropolitan houses.  In short, he was everywhere, in all weathers, at all hours.  Nor was London, smaller and greater, his only walking field.  He would walk wherever he was—­walked through and through Genoa, and all about Genoa, when he lived there; knew every inch of the Kent country round Broadstairs and round Gad’s Hill—­was, as I have said, always, always, always on his feet.  But if he would pedestrianize everywhere, London remained the walking ground of his heart.  As Dr. Johnson held that nothing equalled a stroll down Fleet Street, so did Dickens, sitting in full view of Genoa’s perfect bay, and with the blue Mediterranean sparkling at his feet, turn in thought for inspiration to his old haunts.  “Never,” he writes to Forster, when about to begin “The Chimes,” “never did I stagger so upon a threshold before.  I seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire Terrace, and could take