Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/163

113 THE PICKWICK CLUB. 113

it communicated a very considerable start to his excited frame. Hastily throwing off such articles of clothings as he had put on when he rose from his uneasy bed, and casting- a fearful glance around, he once more scrambled hastily between the sheets, and soon fell fast asleep.

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 that 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 reference to that most important undertaking demands a sepa- rate chapter, we may devote the few lines which remain at the close of this, to narrate, with great brevity, the history of the antiquarian dis- covery.

It appears from the Transactions of the Club, then, that Mr. Pick- wick 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 ibake 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. BlottDn, 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 beeu rudely