The sun was shining brilliantly into his chamber, when he awoke, and

the morning was far advanced. The gloom which had oppressed him

on the previous night had disappeared with the dark shadows which

shrouded the landscape, and his thoughts and feelings were as light

and gay as the morning itself. After a hearty breakfast, the four

gentlemen sallied forth to walk to Gravesend, followed by a man

bearing the stone in its deal box. They reached the town about one

o'clock (their luggage they had directed to be forwarded to the city,

from Rochester), and being fortunate enough to secure places on the

outside of a coach, arrived in London in sound health and spirits, on

that same afternoon.

The next three or four days were occupied with the preparations

which were necessary for their journey to the borough of Eatanswill.

As any references to that most important undertaking demands a

separate chapter, we may devote the few lines which remain at the

close of this, to narrate, with great brevity, the history of the

antiquarian discovery.

It appears from the Transactions of the Club, then, that Mr Pickwick

lectured upon the discovery at a General Club Meeting, convened on

the night succeeding their return, and entered into a variety of

ingenious and erudite speculations on the meaning of the inscription.

It also appears that a skilful artist executed a faithful delineation of

the curiosity, which was engraven on stone, and presented to the

Royal Antiquarian Society, and other learned bodies: that heart-

burnings and jealousies without number were created by rival

controversies which were penned upon the subject; and that Mr

Pickwick himself wrote a pamphlet, containing ninety-six pages of very

small print, and twenty-seven different readings of the inscription:

that three old gentlemen cut off their eldest sons with a shilling a-

piece for presuming to doubt the antiquity of the fragment; and that

one enthusiastic individual cut himself off prematurely, in despair at

being unable to fathom its meaning: that Mr Pickwick was elected an

honorary member of seventeen native and foreign societies, for making

the discovery: that none of the seventeen could make anything of it;

but that all the seventeen agreed it was very extraordinary.

Mr Blotton, indeed - and the name will be doomed to the undying

contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime - Mr

Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds,

presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr

Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name

of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and

on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he

had seen the man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man

presumed the stone to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity

of the inscription - inasmuch as he represented it to have been rudely

The Pickwick Papers