The original of Bleak House was a country mansion in Hertfordshire, near St. Albans, though it is usually said to be a summer residence of the novelist at Broadstairs.

It was on these high cliffs that the opulent Romans built their villas and they must have been as much crowded together as the villas at Ramsgate and Broadstairs.

" In the summer of 1877 Lord Russell had taken a house overlooking the sea near Broadstairs.

But he was falling into a gradual decline, the consequence of great age, and after they came home from Broadstairs, he never again left Pembroke Lodge.

It contains many beautiful watering places,Margate, Ramsgate, and Broadstairs on the sea; St. Lawrence, Birchington, and St. Peter's, inland.

Two well-known dippers at the Broadstairs' shore, Stout, sturdy churls, have stript him to the skin, And naked, cold, and shivering plunge him in.

Hanusch Kozelik, the famous Czecho-Slovakian amateur, who has recently done some wonderful rounds at Broadstairs, cordially supports GEORGE DUNCAN'S advocacy of a larger hole.

THANET, ISLE OF (58), forms the NE. corner of Kent, from the mainland of which it is separated by the Stour and the rivulet Nethergong; on its shores, washed by the North Sea, stand the popular watering-places, Ramsgate, Margate, and Broadstairs; the north-eastern extremity, the North Foreland, is crowned by a lighthouse.