high up on a hill, on the fashionable side of a fashionable church, was a tomb which was soon identified as the final resting-place of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and their daughter Mary, and Mary's and Shelley's son, Sir Peter Florence Shelley, and his wife Jane. And standing before it, I thought of the "Ridiculous Philosopher" whose last will and testament, never probated apparently, I had at home. I thought of how he had bequeathed all the property of which he died possessed-meaning thereby his debts, no doubt -to his wife Mary Jane, and how he had left to his son and daughter "his most affectionate remembrances." I remembered that his portrait by Northcote, which he had described as "the principal memorandum of his corporal existence," was ultimately to go to Mary, as was the portrait of her mother by Opie. I recalled that he asked that his remains should be interred as near as might be to those of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, in St. Pancras's churchyard. Doubtless he loved her: she is, indeed, one of the most interesting figures in English literature and so little known! I remembered, too, my copy, that was once Claire's, of Godwin's little book, On Sepulchres. How pleased, I thought, he would have been with his tomb, and how little he deserved it! Its splendor, which would seem to ensure admission into Heaven, came to him as a result of his daughter being seduced by one of the "Castle Goring Shelleys" - to use a phrase that means much in England.

Erected in a small temple in University College, Orford. The base suggests a gigantic ink-well on which rests a huge platter, with the rather unpleasant figure of the dead poet thereon. Dreadful as the memorial is in its present location, it would have been still more

incongruous had it been erected in the cemetery for which it was designed.

To sum up the Skinner Street News: Here lies the contemptible, middle-class old sinner who, having all his life railed against the laws of God and man, was finally taken from a neglected grave, along with his first wife, and with her interred in the very odor of sanctity, practically in the arms of a wealthy British baronet. If they had not been deficient in humor, this family, all of them, they would turn in their graves and laugh to find themselves in such elegant and exclusive surroundings. In a marble sepulchre, in a fashionable parklike churchyard, exquisitely kept, in an elegant seaside city, lie these once notorious characters. I thought of the squalor of Hanway Street, and of Skinner Street, of Snow Hill, and of the second Mrs. Godwin she of the green spectacles. What has become of her hashes, I wonder?

XIII

THE GREATEST LITTLE BOOK IN THE WORLD

FOUR ardent Dickensians were seated about a long table; all were talking at once; there were no listeners. Listeners are not important—it is the talkers who make themselves heard. All four were collectors. Why should I not name them?

There was the host, Mr. William M. Elkins of Philadelphia, the owner of the most interesting Pickwick in the world, the immortal book "in parts as issued, with all the points," as the old-book catalogues have it, given - part by part, as they appeared, with sundry inscriptions -to Mary Hogarth, Dickens's sister-in-law, until her untimely death caused the suspension of its publication, while its author recovered from the effects of the shock, and — but it would be fatiguing to refer to the items in Mr. Elkins's collection; let me say, in a word, that he has what is generally regarded as the finest Dickens collection in the world. There was, too, Judge John M. Patterson, President of the Dickens Fellowship, whose knowledge of first editions is exceeded only by that of another of the group, Mr. John C. Eckel, the author of a Bibliography of Dickens, as readable as it is accurate. There was also the writer of this paper, resembling in appearance, it is said, Mr. Pickwick himself, badly distanced in the race as a collector by