"The New River, rather elderly by this time" (he says), "runs, if a
moderate walking pace can be so termed, close to the foot of the house;
behind is a spacious garden, &c., and the cheerful dining-room is studded
all over and rough with old books: I feel like a great lord; never having
had a house before."

From this place (which a friend of his christened "Petty Venice") he used
often to walk into London, to breakfast or dine with an acquaintance. For
walking was always grateful to him. When confined to his room in the India
House, he counted it amongst his principal recreations, and even now, with
the whole world of leisure before him, it ranked amongst his daily
enjoyments. By himself or with an acquaintance, and subsequently with
Hood's dog Dash (whose name should have been Rover), he wandered over all
the roads and by-paths of the adjoining country. He was a peripatetic, in
every way, beyond the followers of Aristotle. Walking occupied his
energies; and when he returned home, he (like Sarah Battle) "unbent his
mind over a book." "I cannot sit and think" is his phrase. If he now and
then stopped for a minute at a rustic public house, tired with the
excursive caprices of Dash--beguiled perhaps by the simple attractions of
a village sign--I hold him excusable for the glass of porter which
sometimes invigorated him in his fatigue.

In the course of these walks he traversed all the green regions which lie
on the north and north-east of the metropolis. In London he loved to
frequent those streets where the old bookshops were, Wardour Street,
Princes Street, Seven Dials (where the shop has been long closed): he
loved also Gray's Inn, in the garden of which he met Dodd, just before his
death ("with his buffoon mask taken off"); and the Temple, into which you
pass from the noise and crowd of Fleet Street,--into the quiet and "ample
squares and green recesses," where the old Dial," the garden god of