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
Christian gardens," then told of Time, and where the still living fountain
sends up its song into the listening air.
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