Dickens can have been in London but the fewest of few days, for on the 13th of December he was leaving Paris for Genoa, and that after going to the theatre more than once.  From Genoa he started again, on the 20th of January, 1845, with Mrs. Dickens, to see the Carnival at Rome.  Thence he went to Naples, returning to Rome for the Holy Week; and thence again by Florence to Genoa.  He finally left Italy in the beginning of June, and was back with his family in Devonshire Terrace at the end of that month.

To what use of a literary kind should he turn his Italian observations and experiences?  In what form should he publish the notes made by the way?  Events soon answered that question.  The year 1845 stands in the history of Queen Victoria’s reign as a time of intense political excitement.  The Corn Law agitation raged somewhat furiously.  Dickens felt strongly impelled to throw himself into the strife.  Why should he not influence his fellow-men, and “battle for the true, the just,” as the able editor of a daily newspaper?  Accordingly, after all the negotiations which enterprises of this kind necessitate, he made the due arrangements for starting a new paper, The Daily News.  It was to be edited by himself, to “be kept free,” the prospectus said, “from personal influence or party bias,” and to be “devoted to the advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong may be redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of society promoted.”  His salary, so I have seen it stated, was to be L2,000 a year; and the first number came out on the morning of the 21st of January, 1846.  He held the post of editor three weeks.

The world may, I think, on the whole, be congratulated that he did not hold it longer.  Able editors are more easily found than such writers as Dickens.  There were higher claims upon his time.  But to return to the Italian Notes:  it was in the columns of The Daily News that they first saw the light.  They were among the baby attractions and charms, if I may so speak, of the nascent paper, which is now, as I need not remind my readers, enjoying a hale and vigorous manhood.  And admirable sketches they are.  Much, very much has been written about Italy.  The subject has been done to death by every variety of pen, and in every civilized tongue.  But amid all this writing, Dickens’ “Pictures from Italy” still holds a high and distinctive position.  That the descriptions, whether of places and works of art, or of life’s pageantry, and what may be called the social picturesque, should be graphic, vivid, animated, was almost a matter of course.  But a priori, I think one might have feared lest he should “chaff” the place and its inhabitants overmuch, and yield to the temptation of making merriment over matters which hoar age and old associations had hallowed.  We can all imagine the kind of observation that would occur to Sam Weller in strolling through St. Mark’s at Venice, or