VIII. FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--continued)…

VIII. FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--continued)

Clifford's Inn--Dyer's Chambers--The Settlement after the Great Fire--Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wives--Fetter Lane--Waller's Plot and its Victims--Praise-God Barebone and his Doings--Charles Lamb at School--Hobbes the Philosopher--A Strange Marriage--Mrs. Brownrigge--Paul Whitehead--The Moravians--The Record Office and its Treasures--Rival Poets.

Clifford's Inn, originally a town house of the Lords Clifford, ancestors of the Earls of Cumberland, given to them by Edward II., was first let to the students of law in the eighteenth year of King Edward III., at a time when might was too often right, and hard knocks decided legal questions oftener than deed or statute. Harrison the regicide was in youth clerk to an attorney in Clifford's Inn, but when the Civil War broke out he rode off and joined the Puritan troopers.

Clifford's Inn is the oldest Inn in Chancery. There was formerly, we learn from Mr. Jay, an office there, out of which were issued writs, called "Bills of Middlesex," the appointment of which office was in the gift of the senior judge of the Queen's Bench. "But what made this Inn once noted was that all the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court (better known as the Palace Court) had their chambers there, as also had the satellites, who paid so much per year for using their names and looking at the nature of their practice. I should say that more misery emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous counties in England. The causes in this court were obliged to be tried in the city of Westminster, near the Palace, and it was a melancholy sight (except to lawyers) to observe in the court the crowd of every description of persons suing one another. The most remarkable man in the court was the extremely fat prothonotary, Mr. Hewlett, who sat under the judge or the judge's deputy, with a wig on his head like a thrush's nest, and with only one book before him, which was one of the volumes of 'Burns' Justice.' I knew a respectable gentleman (Mr. G. Dyer) who resided here in chambers (where he died) over a firm of Marshalsea attorneys. This gentleman, who wrote a history of Cambridge University and a biography of Robinson of Cambridge, had been a Bluecoat boy, went as a Grecian to Cambridge, and, after the University, visited almost every celebrated library in Europe. It often struck me what a mighty difference there was between what was going on in the one set of chambers and the other underneath. At Mr. Dyer's I have seen Sir Walter Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, Talfourd, and many other celebrated literati, 'all benefiting by hearing, which was but of little advantage to the owner.' In the lawyers' chambers below were people wrangling, swearing, and shouting, and some, too, even fighting, the only relief to which was the eternal stamping of cognovits, bound in a book as large as a family Bible." The Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord Chelmsford both at one time practised in the County Court, purchased their situations for large sums, and afterwards sold them. "It was not a bad nursery for a young barrister, as he had an opportunity of addressing a jury. There were only four counsel who had a right to practise in this court, and if you took a first-rate advocate in there specially, you were obliged to give briefs to two of the privileged four. On the tombstone of one of the compensated Marshalsea attorneys is cut the bitterly ironical epitaph, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.""

Coke, that great luminary of English jurisprudence, resided at Clifford's Inn for a year, and then entered himself at the Inner Temple. Coke, it will be remembered, conducted the prosecution of both Essex and Raleigh; in both cases he was grossly unfeeling to fallen great men.

The George Dyer mentioned by Mr. Jay was not the author of "The Fleece," but that eccentric and amiable old scholar sketched by Charles Lamb in "The Essays of Elia." Dyer was a poet and an antiquary, and edited nearly all the 140 volumes of the Delphin Classics for Valpy. Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually settled down in the monastic solitude of Clifford's Inn to compose verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour in Colebrooke Row into the New River, and was then fished out and restored with brandy-and-water, Lamb was never tired of telling. At the latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died in 1841.

The hall of Clifford's Inn is memorable as being the place where Sir Matthew Hale and seventeen other wise and patient judges sat, after the Great Fire of 1666, to adjudicate upon the claims of the landlords and tenants of burned houses, and prevent future lawsuits. The difficulty of discovering the old boundaries, under the mountains of ashes, must have been great; and forty thick folio volumes of decisions, now preserved in the British Museum, tell of many a legal headache in Clifford's Inn.

A very singular custom, and probably of great antiquity, prevails after the dinners at Clifford's Inn. The society is divided into two sections--the Principal and Aules, and the Junior or "Kentish Men." When the meal is over, the chairman of the Kentish Men, standing up at the Junior table, bows gravely to the Principal, takes from the hand of a servitor standing by four small rolls of bread, silently dashes them three times on the table, and then pushes them down to the further end of the board, from whence they are removed. Perfect silence is preserved during this mystic ceremony, which some antiquary who sees deeper into millstones than his brethren thinks typifies offerings to Ceres, who first taught mankind the use of laws and originated those peculiar ornaments of civilisation, their expounders, the lawyers.

In the hall is preserved an old oak folding case, containing the forty-seven rules of the institution, now almost defaced, and probably of the reign of Henry VIII. The hall casement contains armorial glass with the bearings of Baptist Hicks, Viscount Camden, &c.

Robert Pultock, the almost unknown author of that graceful story, "Peter Wilkins," from whose flying women Southey drew his poetical notion of the Glendoveer, or flying spirit, in his wild poem of "The Curse of Kehama," lived in this Inn, paced on its terrace, and mused in its garden. "'Peter Wilkins' is to my mind," says Coleridge (in his "Table Talk"), "a work of uncommon beauty, and yet Stothard's illustrations have added beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Peter Wilkins' could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of 'Peter Wilkins,' but there are many beautiful things in it, especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside, she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers, to be like him! It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, ejusdem generis, to 'Peter Wilkins' and 'Robinson Crusoe.' I once projected such a thing, but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouqué might effect something; but I should fear that neither he nor any other German could entirely understand what may be called the 'desert island' feeling. I would try the marvellous line of 'Peter Wilkins,' if I attempted it, rather than the real fiction of 'Robinson Crusoe.'"

The name of the author of "Peter Wilkins" was discovered only a few years ago. In the year 1835 Mr. Nicol, the printer, sold by auction a number of books and manuscripts in his possession, which had formerly belonged to the well-known publisher, Dodsley; and in arranging them for sale, the original agreement for the sale of the manuscript of "Peter Wilkins," by the author, "Robert Pultock, of Clifford's Inn," to Dodsley, was discovered. From this document it appears that Mr. Pultock received twenty pounds, twelve copies of the work, and "the cuts of the first impression"--i.e., a set of proof impressions of the fanciful engravings that professed to illustrate the first edition of the work--as the price of the entire copyright. This curious document had been sold afterwards to John Wilkes, Esq., M.P.

Inns of Chancery, like Clifford's Inn, were originally law schools, to prepare students for the larger Inns of Court.

Fetter Lane did not derive its name from the manufacture of Newgate fetters. Stow, who died early in the reign of James I., calls it "Fewtor Lane," from the Norman-French word "fewtor" (idle person, loafer), perhaps analogous to the even less complimentary modern French word "foutre" (blackguard). Mr. Jesse, however, derives the word "fetter" from the Norman "defaytor" (defaulter), as if the lane had once been a sanctuary for skulking debtors. In either case the derivation is somewhat ignoble, but the inhabitants have long since lived it down. Stow says it was once a mere byway leading to gardens (quantum mutatus!) If men of the Bobadil and Pistol character ever did look over the garden-gates and puff their Trinidado in the faces of respectable passers-by, the lane at least regained its character later, when poets and philosophers condescended to live in it, and persons of considerable consequence rustled their silks and trailed their velvet along its narrow roadway.

During the Middle Ages Fetter Lane slumbered, but it woke up on the breaking out of the Civil War, and in 1643 became unpleasantly celebrated as the spot where Waller's plot disastrously terminated.

In the second year of the war between King and Parliament, the Royal successes at Bath, Bristol, and Cornwall, as well as the partial victory at Edgehill, had roused the moderate party and chilled many lukewarm adherents of the Puritans. The distrust of Pym and his friends soon broke out into a reactionary plot, or, more probably, two plots, in one or both of which Waller, the poet, was dangerously mixed up. The chief conspirators were Tomkins and Challoner, the former Waller's brother-in-law, a gentleman living in Holborn, near the end of Fetter Lane, and a secretary to the Commissioners of the Royal Revenues; the latter an eminent citizen, well known on 'Change. Many noblemen and Cavalier officers and gentlemen had also a whispering knowledge of the ticklish affair. The projects of these men, or of some of the more desperate, at least, were--(1) to secure the king's children; (2) to seize Mr. Pym, Colonel Hampden, and other members of Parliament specially hostile to the king; (3) to arrest the Puritan Lord Mayor, and all the sour-faced committee of the City Militia; (4) to capture the outworks, forts, magazines, and gates of the Tower and City, and to admit 3,000 Cavaliers sent from Oxford by a pre-arranged plan; (5) to resist all payments imposed by Parliament for support of the armies of the Earl of Essex. Unfortunately, just as the white ribbons were preparing to tie round the arms of the conspirators, to mark them on the night of action, a treacherous servant of Mr. Tomkins, of Holborn, overheard Waller's plans from behind a convenient arras, and disclosed them to the angry Parliament. In a cellar at Tomkins's the soldiers who rummaged it found a commission sent from the king by Lady Aubigny, whose husband had been recently killed at Edgehill.

Tomkins and Challoner were hung at the Holborn end of Fetter Lane. On the ladder, Tomkins said:--"Gentlemen, I humbly acknowledge, in the sight of Almighty God (to whom, and to angels, and to this great assembly of people, I am now a spectacle), that my sins have deserved of Him this untimely and shameful death; and, touching the business for which I suffer, I acknowledge that affection to a brother-in-law, and affection and gratitude to the king, whose bread I have eaten now about twenty-two years (I have been servant to him when he was prince, and ever since: it will be twenty-three years in August next)--I confess these two motives drew me into this foolish business. I have often since declared to good friends that I was glad it was discovered, because it might have occasioned very ill consequences; and truly I have repented having any hand in it."

Challoner was equally fatal against Waller, and said, when at the same giddy altitude as Tomkins, "Gentlemen, this is the happiest day that ever I had. I shall now, gentlemen, declare a little more of the occasion of this, as I am desired by Mr. Peters [the famous Puritan divine, Hugh Peters] to give him and the world satisfaction in it. It came from Mr. Waller, under this notion, that if we could make a moderate party here in London, and stand betwixt and in the gap to unite the king and the Parliament, it would be a very acceptable work, for now the three kingdoms lay a-bleeding; and unless that were done, there was no hopes to unite them," &c.

Waller had a very narrow escape, but he extricated himself with the most subtle skill, perhaps secretly aided by his kinsman, Cromwell. He talked of his "carnal eye," of his repentance, of the danger of letting the army try a member of the House. As Lord Clarendon says: "With incredible dissimulation he acted such a remorse of conscience, that his trial was put off, out of Christian compassion, till he could recover his understanding." In the meantime, he bribed the Puritan preachers, and listened with humble deference to their prayers for his repentance. He bent abjectly before the House; and eventually, with a year's imprisonment and a fine of £10,000, obtained leave to retire to France. Having spent all his money in Paris, Waller at last obtained permission from Cromwell to return to England. "There cannot," says Clarendon, "be a greater evidence of the inestimable value of his (Waller's) parts, than that he lived after this in the good esteem and affection of many, the pity of most, and the reproach and scorn of few or none." The body of the unlucky Tomkins was buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn.

According to Peter Cunningham, that shining light of the Puritan party in the early days of Cromwell, "Praise-God Barebone," was a leather-seller in Fetter Lane, having a house, either at the same time or later, called the "Lock and Key," near Crane Court, at which place his son, a great speculator and builder, afterwards resided. Barebone (probably Barbon, of a French Huguenot family) was one of those gloomy religionists who looked on surplices, plum-porridge, theatres, dances, Christmas pudding, and homicide as equally detestable, and did his best to shut out all sunshine from that long, rainy, stormy day that is called life. He was at the head of that fanatical, tender-conscienced Parliament of 1653 that Cromwell convened from among the elect in London, after untoward Sir Harry Vane had been expelled from Westminster at the muzzles of Pride's muskets. Of Barebone, also, and his crochetty, impracticable fellows, Cromwell had soon enough; and, in despair of all aid but from his own brain and hand, he then took the title of Lord Protector, and became the most inflexible and wisest monarch we have ever had, or indeed ever hope to have. Barebone is first heard of in local history as preaching in 1641, together with Mr. Greene, a felt-maker, at a conventicle in Fetter Lane, a place always renowned for its heterodoxy. The thoughtless Cavaliers, who did not like long sermons, and thought all religion but their own hypocrisy, delighted in gaunt Barebone's appropriate name, and made fun of him in those ribald ballads in which they consigned red-nosed Noll, the brewer, to the reddest and hottest portion of the unknown world. At the Restoration, when all Fleet Street was ablaze with bonfires to roast the Rumps, the street boys, always on the strongest side, broke poor Barebone's windows, though he had been constable and common-councilman, and was a wealthy leather-seller to boot. But he was not looked upon as of the regicide or extreme dangerous party, and a year afterwards attended a vestry-meeting unmolested. After the Great Fire he came to the Clifford's Inn Appeal Court about his Fleet Street house, which had been burnt over the heads of his tenants, and eventually he rebuilt it.

In Irving's "History of Dissenters" there is a curious account, from an old pamphlet entitled "New Preachers," "of Barebone, Greene the felt-maker, Spencer the horse-rubber, Quartermaine the brewer's clerk, and some few others, who are mighty sticklers in this new kind of talking trade, which many ignorant coxcombs call preaching; whereunto is added the last tumult in Fleet Street, raised by the disorderly preachment, pratings, and prattlings of Mr. Barebone the leather-seller, and Mr. Greene the felt-maker, on Sunday last, the 19th December."

The tumult alluded to is thus described: "A brief touch in memory of the fiery zeal of Mr. Barebone, a reverend unlearned leather-seller, who with Mr. Greene the felt-maker were both taken preaching or prating in a conventicle amongst a hundred persons, on Sunday, the 19th of December last, 1641."

One of the pleasantest memories of Fetter Lane is that which connects it with the school-days of that delightful essay-writer, Charles Lamb. He himself, in one of Hone's chatty books, has described the school, and Bird, its master, in his own charming way.

Both Lamb and his sister, says Mr. Fitzgerald, in his Memoir of Lamb, went to a school where Starkey had been usher about a year before they came to it--a room that looked into "a discoloured, dingy garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. This was close to Holborn. Queen Street, where Lamb lived when a boy, was in Holborn." Bird is described as an "eminent writer" who taught mathematics, which was no more than "cyphering." "Heaven knows what languages were taught there. I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. It was, in fact, a humble day-school." Bird and Cook, he says, were the masters. Bird had "that peculiar mild tone--especially when he was inflicting punishment--which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, whence we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and solemnity." He then describes the ferule--"that almost obsolete weapon now." "To make him look more formidable--if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings--Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering." This is in Lamb's most delightful vein. So, too, with other incidents of the school, especially "our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; and the agonising benches on which we were all cramped together, and yet encouraged to attain a free hand, unattainable in this position." Lamb recollected even his first copy--"Art improves nature," and could look back with "pardonable pride to his carrying off the first premium for spelling. Long after, certainly thirty years, the school was still going on, only there was a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, unknown in our humbler days." In the evening was a short attendance of girls, to which Miss Lamb went, and she recollected the theatricals, and even Cato being performed by the young gentlemen. "She describes the cast of the characters with relish. 'Martha,' by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa."

The Starkey mentioned by Lamb was a poor, crippled dwarf, generally known at Newcastle in his old age as "Captain Starkey," the butt of the street-boys and the pensioner of benevolent citizens. In 1818, when he had been an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, Newcastle, for twenty-six years, the poor old ex-usher of the Fetter Lane school wrote "The Memoirs of his Life," a humble little pamphlet of only fourteen pages, upon which Hone good-naturedly wrote an article which educed Lamb's pleasant postscript. Starkey, it appears, had been usher, not in Lamb's own time, but in that of Mary Lamb's, who came after her brother had left. She describes Starkey running away on one occasion, being brought back by his father, and sitting the remainder of the day with his head buried in his hands, even the most mischievous boys respecting his utter desolation.

That clever but mischievous advocate of divine right and absolute power, Hobbes of Malmesbury, was lodging in Fetter Lane when he published his "Leviathan." He was not there, however, in 1660, at the Restoration, since we are told that on that glorious occasion he was standing at the door of Salisbury House, the mansion of his kind and generous patron, the Earl of Devonshire; and that the king, formerly Hobbes's pupil in mathematics, nodded to his old tutor. A short duodecimo sketch of Hobbes may not be uninteresting. This sceptical philosopher, hardened into dogmatic selfishness by exile, was the son of a Wiltshire clergyman, and he first saw the light the year of the Armada, his mother being prematurely confined during the first panic of the Spanish invasion. Hobbes, with that same want of self-respect and love of independence that actuated Gay and Thomson, remained his whole life a tolerated pensioner of his former pupil, the Earl of Devonshire; bearing, no doubt, in his time many rebuffs; for pride will be proud, and rich men require wisdom, when in their pay, to remember its place. Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for, Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound translation of "Thucydides." He sat at the feet of Galileo and by the side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in Fetter Lane he associated with Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with honours by Cosmo de Medici. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools he lost on Parnassus. His translation of Homer is tasteless and contemptible. In mathematics, too, he was dismounted by Wallis and others. Personally he had weaknesses. He was afraid of apparitions, he dreaded assassination, and had a fear that Burnet and the bishops would burn him as a heretic. His philosophy, though useful, as Mr. Mill says, in expanding free thought and exciting inquiry, was based on selfishness. Nothing can be falser and more detestable than the maxims of this sage of the Restoration and of reaction. He holds the natural condition of man to be a state of war--a war of all men against all men; might making right, and the conqueror trampling down all the rest. The civil laws, he declares, are the only standards of good or evil. The sovereign, he asserts, possesses absolute power, and is not bound by any compact with the people (who pay him as their head servant). Nothing he does can be wrong. The sovereign has the right of interpreting Scripture; and he thinks that Christians are bound to obey the laws of an infidel king, even in matters of religion. He sneers at the belief in a future state, and hints at materialism. These monstrous doctrines, which even Charles II. would not fully sanction, were naturally battered and bombarded by Harrington, Dr. Henry More, and others. Hobbes was also vehemently attacked by that disagreeable Dr. Fell, the subject of the well-known epigram,--

"I do not like thee, Dr. Fell; The reason why I cannot tell; But this I know, and know full well, I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,"

who rudely called Hobbes "irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmsburiense animal." The philosopher of Fetter Lane, who was short-sighted enough to deride the early efforts of the Royal Society, though they were founded on the strict inductive Baconian theory, seems to have been a vain man, loving paradox rather than truth, and desirous of founding, at all risks, a new school of philosophy. The Civil War had warped him; solitary thinking had turned him into a cynical dogmatiser. He was timid as Erasmus; and once confessed that if he was cast into a deep pit, and the devil should put down his hot cloven foot, he would take hold of it to draw himself out. This was not the metal that such men as Luther and Latimer were made of; but it served for the Aristotle of Rochester and Buckingham. A wit of the day proposed as Hobbes's epitaph the simple words, "The philosopher's stone."

Hobbes's professed rule of health was to dedicate the morning to his exercise and the afternoon to his studies. At his first rising, therefore, he walked out and climbed any hill within his reach; or, if the weather was not dry, he fatigued himself within doors by some exercise or other, in order to perspire, recommending that practice upon this opinion, that an old man had more moisture than heat, and therefore by such motion heat was to be acquired and moisture expelled. After this he took a comfortable breakfast, then went round the lodgings to wait upon the earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable strangers, paying some short addresses to all of them. He kept these rounds till about twelve o'clock, when he had a little dinner provided for him, which he ate always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after dinner he retired to his study, and had his candle, with ten or twelve pipes of tobacco, laid by him; then, shutting his door, he fell to smoking, thinking, and writing for several hours.

At a small coal-shed (just one of those black bins still to be seen at the south-west end) in Fetter Lane, Dr. Johnson's friend, Levett, the poor apothecary, met a woman of bad character, who duped him into marriage. The whole story, Dr. Johnson used to say, was as marvellous as any page of "The Arabian Nights." Lord Macaulay, in his highly-coloured and somewhat exaggerated way, calls Levett "an old quack doctor, who bled and dosed coal-heavers and hackney-coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and a little copper." Levett, however, was neither a quack nor a doctor, but an honest man and an apothecary, and the list of his patients is entirely hypothetical. This simple-hearted, benevolent man was persuaded by the proprietress of the coal-shed that she had been defrauded of her birthright by her kinsman, a man of fortune. Levett, then nearly sixty, married her; and four months after, a writ was issued against him for debts contracted by his wife, and he had to lie close to avoid the gaol. Not long afterwards his amiable wife ran away from him, and, being taken up for picking pockets, was tried at the Old Bailey, where she defended herself, and was acquitted. Dr. Johnson then, touched by Levett's misfortunes and goodness, took him to his own home at Bolt Court.

It was in a house on the east side of this lane, looking into Fleur-de-Lys Court, that (in 1767) Elizabeth Brownrigge, midwife to the St. Dunstan's workhouse and wife of a house-painter, cruelly ill-used her two female apprentices. Mary Jones, one of these unfortunate children, after being often beaten, ran back to the Foundling, from whence she had been taken. On the remaining one, Mary Mitchell, the wrath of the avaricious hag now fell with redoubled severity. The poor creature was perpetually being stripped and beaten, was frequently chained up at night nearly naked, was scratched, and her tongue cut with scissors. It was the constant practice of Mrs. Brownrigge to fasten the girl's hands to a rope slung from a beam in the kitchen, after which this old wretch beat her four or five times in the same day with a broom or a whip. The moanings and groans of the dying child, whose wounds were mortifying from neglect, aroused the pity of a baker opposite, who sent the overseers of the parish to see the child, who was found hid in a buffet cupboard. She was taken to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and soon died. Brownrigge was at once arrested; but Mrs. Brownrigge and her son, disguising themselves in Rag Fair, fled to Wandsworth, and there took lodgings in a chandler's shop, where they were arrested. The woman was tried at the Old Bailey sessions, and found guilty of murder. Mr. Silas Told, an excellent Methodist preacher, who attended her in the condemned cell, has left a curious, simple-hearted account of her behaviour and of what he considered her repentance. She talked a great deal of religion, and stood much on the goodness of her past life. The mob raged terribly as she passed through the streets on her way to Tyburn. The women especially screamed, "Tear off her hat; let us see her face! The devil will fetch her!" and threw stones and mud, pitiless in their hatred. After execution her corpse was thrust into a hackney-coach and driven to Surgeons' Hall for dissection; the skeleton is still preserved in a London collection. The cruel hag's husband and son were sentenced to six months' imprisonment. A curious old drawing is still extant, representing Mrs. Brownrigge in the condemned cell. She wears a large, broad-brimmed gipsy hat, tied under her chin, and a cape; and her long, hard face wears a horrible smirk of resigned hypocrisy. Canning, in one of his bitter banters on Southey's republican odes, writes,--

"For this act Did Brownrigge swing. Harsh laws! But time shall come When France shall reign, and laws be all repealed."

In Castle Street (an offshoot of Fetter Lane), in 1709-10 (Queen Anne), at the house of his father, a master tailor, was born a very small poet, Paul Whitehead. This poor satirist and worthless man became a Jacobite barrister and protégé of Bubb Doddington and the Prince of Wales and his Leicester Fields Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called "Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a villa on Twickenham Common, where Hogarth used to visit him. If Whitehead is ever remembered, it will be only for that splash of vitriol that Churchill threw in his face, when he wrote of the turncoat,--

"May I--can worse disgrace on manhood fall?-- Be born a Whitehead and baptised a Paul."

It was this Whitehead, with Carey, the surgeon of the Prince of Wales, who got up a mock procession, in ridicule of the Freemasons' annual cavalcade from Brooke Street to Haberdashers' Hall. The ribald procession consisted of shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps, in carts drawn by asses, followed by a mourning-coach with six horses, each of a different colour. The City authorities very properly refused to let them pass through Temple Bar, but they waited there and saluted the Masons. Hogarth published a print of "The Scald Miserables," which is coarse, and even dull. The Prince of Wales, with more good sense than usual, dismissed Carey for this offensive buffoonery. Whitehead bequeathed his heart to Earl Despenser, who buried it in his mausoleum with absurd ceremonial.

At Pemberton Row, formerly Three-Leg Alley, Fetter Lane, lived that very indifferent poet but admirable miniature-painter of Charles II.'s time, Flatman. He was a briefless barrister of the Inner Temple, and resided with his father till the period of his death. Anthony Wood tells us that having written a scurrilous ballad against marriage, beginning,--

"Like a dog with a bottle tied close to his tail, Like a Tory in a bog, or a thief in a jail,"

his comrades serenaded him with the song on his wedding-night. Rochester wrote some vigorous lines on Flatman, which are not unworthy even of Dryden himself,--

"Not that slow drudge, in swift Pindaric strains, Flatman, who Cowley imitates with pains, And drives a jaded Muse, whipt with loose reins."

We find Dr. Johnson quoting these lines with approval, in a conversation in which he suggested that Pope had partly borrowed his "Dying Christian" from Flatman.

"The chapel of the United Brethren, or Moravians, 32, Fetter Lane," says Smith, in his "Streets of London," "was the meeting-house of the celebrated Thomas Bradbury. During the riots which occurred on the trial of Dr. Sacheveral, this chapel was assaulted by the mob and dismantled, the preacher himself escaping with some difficulty. The other meeting-houses that suffered on this occasion were those of Daniel Burgess, in New Court, Carey Street; Mr. Earl's, in Hanover Street, Long Acre; Mr. Taylor's, Leather Lane; Mr. Wright's, Great Carter Lane; and Mr. Hamilton's, in St. John's Square, Clerkenwell. With the benches and pulpits of several of these, the mob, after conducting Dr. Sacheveral in triumph to his lodgings in the Temple, made a bonfire in the midst of Lincoln's Inn Fields, around which they danced with shouts of 'High Church and Sacheveral,' swearing, if they found Daniel Burgess, that they would roast him in his own pulpit in the midst of the pile."

This Moravian chapel was one of the original eight conventicles where Divine worship was permitted. Baxter preached here in 1672, and Wesley and Whitefield also struck great blows at the devil in this pulpit, where Zinzendorf's followers afterwards prayed and sang their fervent hymns.

Count Zinzendorf, the poet, theologian, pastor, missionary, and statesman, who first gave the Moravian body a vital organisation, and who preached in Fetter Lane to the most tolerant class of all Protestants, was born in Dresden in 1700. His ancestors, originally from Austria, had been Crusaders and Counts of Zinzendorf. One of the Zinzendorfs had been among the earliest converts to Lutheranism, and became a voluntary exile for the faith. The count's father was one of the Pietists, a sect protected by the first king of Prussia, the father of Frederick the Great. The founder of the Pietists laid special stress on the doctrine of conversion by a sudden transformation of the heart and will. It was a young Moravian missionary to Georgia who first induced Wesley to embrace the vital doctrine of justification by faith. For a long time there was a close kinsmanship maintained between Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the Moravians; but eventually Wesley pronounced Zinzendorf as verging on Antinomianism, while Zinzendorf objected to Wesley's doctrine of sinless perfection. In 1722 Zinzendorf gave an asylum to two families of persecuted Moravian brothers, and built houses for them on a spot he called Hernhut ("watched of the Lord"), a marshy tract in Saxony, near the main road to Zittau. These simple and pious men were Taborites, a section of the old Hussites, who had renounced obedience to the Pope and embraced the Vaudois doctrines. This was the first formation of the Moravian sect.

"On January 24th, 1672-73," says Baxter, "I began a Tuesday lecture at Mr. Turner's church, in New Street, near Fetter Lane, with great convenience and God's encouraging blessing; but I never took a penny for it from any one." The chapel in which Baxter officiated in Fetter Lane is that between Nevil's Court and New Street, once occupied by the Moravians. It appears to have existed, though perhaps in a different form, before the Great Fire of London. Turner, who was the first minister, was a very active man during the plague. He was ejected from Sunbury, in Middlesex, and continued to preach in Fetter Lane till towards the end of the reign of Charles II., when he removed to Leather Lane. Baxter carried on the Tuesday morning lecture till the 24th of August, 1682. The Church which then met in it was under the care of Mr. Lobb, whose predecessor had been Thankful Owen, president of St. John's College, Oxford. Ejected by the commissioners in 1660, he became a preacher in Fetter Lane. "He was," says Calamy, "a man of genteel learning and an excellent temper, admir'd for an uncommon fluency and easiness and sweetness in all his composures. After he was ejected he retired to London, where he preached privately and was much respected. He dy'd at his house in Hatton Garden, April 1, 1681. He was preparing for the press, and had almost finished, a book entituled 'Imago Imaginis,' the design of which was to show that Rome Papal was an image of Rome Pagan."

At No. 96, Fetter Lane is an Independent Chapel, whose first minister was Dr. Thomas Goodwin, 1660-1681--troublous times for Dissenters. Goodwin had been a pastor in Holland and a favourite of Cromwell. The Protector made him one of his commissioners for selecting preachers, and he was also President of Magdalen College, Oxford. When Cromwell became sick unto death, Goodwin boldly prophesied his recovery, and when the great man died, in spite of him, he is said to have exclaimed, "Thou hast deceived us, and we are deceived;" which is no doubt a Cavalier calumny. On the Restoration, the Oxford men showed Goodwin the door, and he retired to the seclusion of Fetter Lane. He seems to have been a good scholar and an eminent Calvinist divine, and he left on Puritan shelves five ponderous folio volumes of his works. The present chapel, says Mr. Noble, dates from 1732, and the pastor is the Rev. John Spurgeon, the father of the eloquent Baptist preacher, the Rev. C.H. Spurgeon.

The disgraceful disorder of the national records had long been a subject of regret among English antiquaries. There was no certainty of finding any required document among such a mass of ill-stored, dusty, unclassified bundles and rolls--many of them never opened since the day King John sullenly signed Magna Charta. We are a great conservative people, and abuses take a long time ripening before they seem to us fit for removal, so it happened that this evil went on several centuries before it roused the attention of Parliament, and then it was talked over and over, till in 1850 something was at last done. It was resolved to build a special storehouse for national records, where the various collections might be united under one roof, and there be arranged and classified by learned men. The first stone of a magnificent Gothic building was therefore laid by Lord Romilly on 24th May, 1851, and slowly and surely, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, the walls grew till, in the summer of 1866, all the new Search Offices were formally opened, to the great convenience of all students of records. The architect, Sir James Pennethorne, has produced a stately building, useful for its purpose, but not very remarkable for picturesque light and shade, and tame, as all imitations of bygone ages, adapted for bygone uses, must ever be. The number of records stored within this building can only be reckoned by "hundreds of millions." These are Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy's own words. There, in cramped bundles and rolls, dusty as papyri, lie charters and official notices that once made mailed knights tremble and proud priests shake in their sandals. Now--the magic gone, the words powerless--they lie in their several binns in strange companionship. Many years will elapse before all these records of State and Government documents can be classified; but the small staff is industrious, Sir Thomas Hardy is working, and in time the Augean stable of crabbed writings will be cleansed and ranged in order. The useful and accurate calendars of Everett Green, John Bruce, &c., are books of reference invaluable to historical students; and the old chronicles published by order of Lord Romilly, so long Master of the Rolls and Keeper of the Records, are most useful mines for the Froudes and Freemans of the future. In time it is hoped that all the episcopal records of England will be gathered together in this great treasure-house, and that many of our English noblemen will imitate the patriotic generosity of Lord Shaftesbury, in contributing their family papers to the same Gaza in Fetter Lane. Under the concentrated gaze of learned eyes, family papers (valueless and almost unintelligible to their original possessors), often reveal very curious and important facts. Mere lumber in the manor-house, fit only for the butterman, sometimes turns to leaves of gold when submitted to such microscopic analysis. It was such a gift that led to the discovery of the Locke papers among the records of the nobleman above mentioned. The pleasant rooms of the Record Office are open to all applicants; nor is any reference or troublesome preliminary form required from those wishing to consult Court rolls or State papers over twenty years old. Among other priceless treasures the Record Office contains the original, uninjured, Domesday Book, compiled by order of William, the conqueror of England. It is written in a beautiful clerkly hand in close fine character, and is in a perfect state of preservation. It is in two volumes, the covers of which are cut with due economy from the same skin of parchment. Bound in massive board covers, and kept with religious care under glass cases, the precious volumes seem indeed likely to last to the very break of doom. It is curious to remark that London only occupies some three or four pages. There is also preserved the original Papal Bull sent to Henry VIII., with a golden seal attached to it, the work of Benvenuto Cellini. The same collection contains the celebrated Treaty of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the initial portrait of Francis I. being beautifully illuminated and the vellum volume adorned by an exquisite gold seal, in the finest relievo, also by Benvenuto Cellini. The figures in this seal are so perfect in their finish, that even the knee-cap of one of the nymphs is shaped with the strictest anatomical accuracy. The visitor should also see the interesting Inventory Books relating to the foundation of Henry VII.'s chapel.

The national records were formerly bundled up any how in the Rolls Chapel, the White Tower, the Chapter House, Westminster Abbey, Carlton Ride in St. James's Park, the State Paper Office, and the Prerogative Will Office. No one knew where anything was. They were unnoticed--mere dusty lumber, in fact--useless to men or printers' devils. Hot-headed Hugh Peters, during the Commonwealth, had, in his hatred of royalty, proposed to make one great heap of them and burn them up in Smithfield. In that way he hoped to clear the ground of many mischievous traditions. This desperate act of Communism that tough-headed old lawyer, Prynne, opposed tooth and nail. In 1656 he wrote a pamphlet, which he called "A Short Demurrer against Cromwell's Project of Recalling the Jews from their Banishment," and in this work he very nobly epitomizes the value of these treasures; indeed, there could not be found a more lucid syllabus of the contents of the present Record Office than Prynne has there set forth.

Dryden and Otway were contemporaries, and lived, it is said, for some time opposite to each other in Fetter Lane. One morning the latter happened to call upon his brother bard about breakfast-time, but was told by the servant that his master was gone to breakfast with the Earl of Pembroke. "Very well," said Otway, "tell your master that I will call to-morrow morning." Accordingly he called about the same hour. "Well, is your master at home now?" "No, sir; he is just gone to breakfast with the Duke of Buckingham." "The d---- he is," said Otway, and, actuated either by envy, pride, or disappointment, in a kind of involuntary manner, he took up a piece of chalk which lay on a table which stood upon the landing-place, near Dryden's chamber, and wrote over the door,--

"Here lives Dryden, a poet and a wit."

The next morning, at breakfast, Dryden recognised the handwriting, and told the servant to go to Otway and desire his company to breakfast with him. In the meantime, to Otway's line of

"Here lives Dryden, a poet and a wit,"

he added,--

"This was written by Otway, opposite."

When Otway arrived he saw that his line was linked with a rhyme, and being a man of rather petulant disposition, he took it in dudgeon, and, turning upon his heel, told Dryden "that he was welcome to keep his wit and his breakfast to himself."

A curious old book, a vade mecum for malt worms temp. George I., thus immortalises the patriotism of a tavern-keeper in Fetter Lane:--

"Though there are some who, with invidious look, Have styl'd this bird more like a Russian duck Than what he stands depicted for on sign, He proves he well has croaked for prey within, From massy tankards, formed of silver plate, That walk throughout this noted house in state, Ever since Englesfield, in Anna's reign, To compliment each fortunate campaign, Made one be hammered out for ev'ry town was ta'en."

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Chapter IX

FLEET STREET (TRIBUTARIES--CRANE COURT, JOHNSON'S COURT, BOLT COURT).

Removal of the Royal Society from Gresham College--Opposition to Newton--Objections to Removal--The First Catalogue--Swift's jeer at the Society--Franklin's Lightning Conductor and King George III.--Sir Hans Sloane insulted--The Scottish Society--Wilkes's Printer--The Delphin Classics--Johnson's Court--Johnson's Opinion on Pope and Dryden--His Removal to Bolt Court--The John Bull--Hook and Terry--Prosecutions for Libel--Hook's Impudence.

In the old times, when newspapers could not legally be published without a stamp, "various ingenious devices," says a writer in the Bookseller (1867), "were employed to deceive and mislead the officers employed by the Government. Many of the unstamped papers were printed in Crane Court, Fleet Street; and there, on their several days of publication, the officers of the Somerset House solicitor would watch, ready to seize them immediately they came from the press. But the printers were quite equal to the emergency. They would make up sham parcels of waste-paper, and send them out with an ostentatious show of secrecy. The officers--simple fellows enough, though they were called 'Government spies,' 'Somerset House myrmidons,' and other opprobrious names, in the unstamped papers--duly took possession of the parcels, after a decent show of resistance by their bearers, while the real newspapers intended for sale to the public were sent flying by thousands down a shoot in Fleur-de-Lys Court, and thence distributed in the course of the next hour or two all over the town."

The Royal Society came to Crane Court from Gresham College in 1710, and removed in 1782 to Somerset House. This society, according to Dr. Wallis, one of the earliest members, originated in London in 1645, when Dr. Wilkins and certain philosophical friends met weekly to discuss scientific questions. They afterwards met at Oxford, and in Gresham College, till that place was turned into a Puritan barracks. After the Restoration, in 1662, the king, wishing to turn men's minds to philosophy--or, indeed, anywhere away from politics--incorporated the members in what Boyle has called "the Invisible College," and gave it the name of the Royal Society. In 1710, the Mercers' Company growing tired of their visitors, the society moved to a house rebuilt by Wren in 1670, and purchased by the society for £1,450. It had been the residence, before the Great Fire, of Dr. Nicholas Barebone (son of Praise-God Barebone), a great building speculator, who had much property in the Strand, and who was the first promoter of the Phoenix Fire Office. It seems to have been thought at the time that Newton was somewhat despotic in his announcement of the removal, and the members in council grumbled at the new house, and complained of it as small, inconvenient, and dilapidated. Nevertheless, Sir Isaac, unaccustomed to opposition, overruled all these objections, and the society flourished in this Fleet Street "close" seventy-two years. Before the society came to Crane Court, Pepys and Wren had been presidents; while at Crane Court the presidents were--Newton (1703-1727), Sir Thomas Hoare, Matthew Folkes, Esq. (whose portrait Hogarth painted), the Earl of Macclesfield, the Earl of Morton, James Burrow, Esq., James West, Esq., Sir John Pringle, and Sir Joseph Banks. The earliest records of this useful society are filled with accounts of experiments on the Baconian inductive principle, many of which now appear to us puerile, but which were valuable in the childhood of science. Among the labours of the society while in Fleet Street, we may enumerate its efforts to promote inoculation, 1714-1722; electrical experiments on fourteen miles of wires near Shooter's Hill, 1745; ventilation, apropos of gaol fever, 1750; discussions on Cavendish's improved thermometers, 1757; a medal to Dollond for experiments on the laws of light, 1758; observations on the transit of Venus, in 1761; superintendence of the Observatory at Greenwich, 1765; observations of the transit of Venus in the Pacific, 1769 (Lieutenant Cook commenced the expedition); the promotion of an Arctic expedition, 1773; the Racehorse meteorological observations, 1773; experiments on lightning conductors by Franklin, Cavendish, &c., 1772. The removal of the society was, as we have said, at first strongly objected to, and in a pamphlet published at the time, the new purchase is thus described: "The approach to it, I confess, is very fair and handsome, through a long court; but, then, they have no other property in this than in the street before it, and in a heavy rain a man may hardly escape being thoroughly wet before he can pass through it. The front of the house towards the garden is nearly half as long again as that towards Crane Court. Upon the ground floor there is a little hall, and a direct passage from the stairs into the garden, and on each side of it a little room. The stairs are easy, which carry you up to the next floor. Here there is a room fronting the court, directly over the hall; and towards the garden is the meeting-room, and at the end another, also fronting the garden. There are three rooms upon the next floor. These are all that are as yet provided for the reception of the society, except you will have the garrets, a platform of lead over them, and the usual cellars, &c., below, of which they have more and better at Gresham College."

When the society got settled, by Newton's order the porter was clothed in a suitable gown and provided with a staff surmounted by the arms of the society in silver, and on the meeting nights a lamp was hung out over the entrance to the court from Fleet Street. The repository was built at the rear of the house, and thither the society's museum was removed. The first catalogue, compiled by Dr. Green, contains the following, among many other marvellous notices:--

"The quills of a porcupine, which on certain occasions the creature can shoot at the pursuing enemy and erect at pleasure.

"The flying squirrel, which for a good nut-tree will pass a river on the bark of a tree, erecting his tail for a sail.

"The leg-bone of an elephant, brought out of Syria for the thigh-bone of a giant. In winter, when it begins to rain, elephants are mad, and so continue from April to September, chained to some tree, and then become tame again.

"Tortoises, when turned on their backs, will sometimes fetch deep sighs and shed abundance of tears.

"A humming-bird and nest, said to weigh but twelve grains; his feathers are set in gold, and sell at a great rate.

"A bone, said to be taken out of a mermaid's head.

"The largest whale--liker an island than an animal.

"The white shark, which sometimes swallows men whole.

"A siphalter, said with its sucker to fasten on a ship and stop it under sail.

"A stag-beetle, whose horns, worn in a ring, are good against the cramp.

"A mountain cabbage--one reported 300 feet high."

The author of "Hudibras," who died in 1680, attacked the Royal Society for experiments that seemed to him futile and frivolous, in a severe and bitter poem, entitled, "The Elephant in the Moon," the elephant proving to be a mouse inside a philosopher's telescope. The poem expresses the current opinion of the society, on which King Charles II. is once said to have played a joke.

In 1726-27 Swift, too, had his bitter jeer at the society. In Laputa, he thus describes the experimental philosophers:--

"The first man I saw," he says, "was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me 'to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.' I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder, who likewise showed me a treatise he had written concerning the 'Malleability of Fire,' which he intended to publish.

"There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method of building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundation; which he justified to me by the like practice of those two prudent insects, the bee and the spider. I went into another room, where the walls and ceilings were all hung round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the architect to go in and out. At my entrance, he called aloud to me 'not to disturb his webs.' He lamented 'the fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using silk-worms, while we had such plenty of domestic insects who infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave as well as spin.' And he proposed, farther, 'that, by employing spiders, the charge of dying silks would be wholly saved;' whereof I was fully convinced when he showed me a vast number of flies, most beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed his spiders, assuring us, 'that the webs would take a tincture from them;' and, as he had them of all hues, he hoped to fit everybody's fancy, as soon as he could find proper food for the flies, of certain gums, oils, and other glutinous matter, to give a strength and consistence to the threads."

Mr. Grosley, who, in 1770, at Lausanne, published a book on London, has drawn a curious picture of the society at that date. "The Royal Society," he says, "combines within itself the purposes of the Parisian Academy of Sciences and that of Inscriptions; it cultivates, in fact, not only the higher branches of science, but literature also. Every one, whatever his position, and whether English or foreign, who has made observations which appear to the society worthy of its attention, is allowed to submit them to it either by word of mouth or in writing. I once saw a joiner, in his working clothes, announce to the society a means he had discovered of explaining the causes of tides. He spoke a long time, evidently not knowing what he was talking about; but he was listened to with the greatest attention, thanked for his confidence in the value of the society's opinion, requested to put his ideas into writing, and conducted to the door by one of the principal members.

"The place in which the society holds its meetings is neither large nor handsome. It is a long, low, narrow room, only furnished with a table (covered with green cloth), some morocco chairs, and some wooden benches, which rise above each other along the room. The table, placed in front of the fire-place at the bottom of the room, is occupied by the president (who sits with his back to the fire) and the secretaries. On this table is placed a large silver-gilt mace, similar to the one in use in the House of Commons, and which, as is the case with the latter, is laid at the foot of the table when the society is in committee. The president is preceded on his entrance and departure by the beadle of the society, bearing this mace. He has beside him, on his table, a little wooden mallet for the purpose of imposing silence when occasion arises, but this is very seldom the case. With the exception of the secretaries and the president, everyone takes his place hap-hazard, at the same time taking great pains to avoid causing any confusion or noise. The society may be said to consist, as a body corporate, of a committee of about twenty persons, chosen from those of its associates who have the fuller opportunities of devoting themselves to their favourite studies. The president and the secretaries are ex-officio members of the committee, which is renewed every year--an arrangement which is so much the more necessary that, in 1765, the society numbered 400 British members, of whom more than forty were peers of the realm, five of the latter being most assiduous members of the committee.

"The foreign honorary members, who number about 150, comprise within their number all the most famous learned men of Europe, and amongst them we find the names of D'Alembert, Bernouilli, Bonnet, Buffon, Euler, Jussieu, Linné, Voltaire, &c.; together with those, in simple alphabetical order, of the Dukes of Braganza, &c., and the chief Ministers of many European sovereigns."

During the dispute about lightning conductors (after St. Bride's Church was struck in 1764), in the year 1772, George III. (says Mr. Weld, in his "History of the Royal Society") is stated to have taken the side of Wilson--not on scientific grounds, but from political motives; he even had blunt conductors fixed on his palace, and actually endeavoured to make the Royal Society rescind their resolution in favour of pointed conductors. The king, it is declared, had an interview with Sir John Pringle, during which his Majesty earnestly entreated him to use his influence in supporting Mr. Wilson. The reply of the president was highly honourable to himself and the society whom he represented. It was to the effect that duty as well as inclination would always induce him to execute his Majesty's wishes to the utmost of his power; "But, sire," said he, "I cannot reverse the laws and operations of Nature." It is stated that when Sir John regretted his inability to alter the laws of Nature, the king replied, "Perhaps, Sir John, you had better resign." It was shortly after this occurrence that a friend of Dr. Franklin's wrote this epigram:--

"While you, great George, for knowledge hunt, And sharp conductors change for blunt, The nation's out of joint; Franklin a wiser course pursues, And all your thunder useless views, By keeping to the point."

A strange scene in the Royal Society in 1710 (Queen Anne) deserves record. It ended in the expulsion from the council of that irascible Dr. Woodward who once fought a duel with Dr. Mead inside the gate of Gresham College. "The sense," says Mr. Ward, in his "Memoirs," "entertained by the society of Sir Hans Sloane's services and virtues was evinced by the manner in which they resented an insult offered him by Dr. Woodward, who, as the reader is aware, was expelled the council. Sir Hans was reading a paper of his own composition, when Woodward made some grossly insulting remarks. Dr. Sloane complained, and moreover stated that Dr. Woodward had often affronted him by making grimaces at him; upon which Dr. Arbuthnot rose and begged to be 'informed what distortion of a man's face constituted a grimace.' Sir Isaac Newton was in the chair when the question of expulsion was agitated, and when it was pleaded in Woodward's favour that 'he was a good natural philosopher,' Sir Isaac remarked that in order to belong to that society a man ought to be a good moral philosopher as well as a natural one."

The Scottish Society held its meetings in Crane Court. "Elizabeth," says Mr. Timbs, "kept down the number of Scotsmen in London to the astonishingly small one of fifty-eight; but with James I. came such a host of traders and craftsmen, many of whom failing to obtain employment, gave rise, as early as 1613, to the institution of the 'Scottish Box,' a sort of friendly society's treasury, when there were no banks to take charge of money. In 1638 the company, then only twenty, met in Lamb's Conduit Street. In this year upwards of 300 poor Scotsmen, swept off by the great plague of 1665-66, were buried at the expense of the 'box,' while numbers more were nourished during their sickness, without subjecting the parishes in which they resided to the smallest expense.

"In the year 1665 the 'box' was exalted into the character of a corporation by a royal charter, the expenses attendant on which were disbursed by gentlemen who, when they met at the 'Cross Keys,' in Covent Garden, found their receipts to be £116 8s. 5d. The character of the times is seen in one of their regulations, which imposed a fine of 2s. 6d. for every oath used in the course of their quarterly business.

"Presents now flocked in. One of the corporation gave a silver cup; another, an ivory mallet or hammer for the chairman; and among the contributors we find Gilbert Burnet, afterwards bishop, giving £1 half-yearly. In no very Scotsman-like spirit the governors distributed each quarter-day all that had been collected during the preceding interval. But in 1775 a permanent fund was established. The hospital now distributes about £2,200 a year, chiefly in £10 pensions to old people; and the princely bequest of £76,495 by Mr. W. Kinloch, who had realised a fortune in India, allows of £1,800 being given in pensions of £4 to disabled soldiers and sailors.

"All this is highly honourable to those connected, by birth or otherwise, with Scotland. The monthly meetings of the society are preceded by divine service in the chapel, which is in the rear of the house in Crane Court. Twice a year is held a festival, at which large sums are collected. On St. Andrew's Day, 1863, Viscount Palmerston presided, with the brilliant result of the addition of £1,200 to the hospital fund."

Appended to the account of the society already quoted we find the following remarkable "note by an Englishman":--

"It is not one of the least curious particulars in the history of the Scottish Hospital that it substantiates by documentary evidence the fact that Scotsmen who have gone to England occasionally find their way back to their own country. It appears from the books of the corporation that in the year ending 30th November, 1850, the sum of £30 16s. 6d. was spent in passages from London to Leith; and there is actually a corresponding society in Edinburgh to receive the revenants and pass them on to their respective districts."

In Crane Court, says Mr. Timbs, lived Dryden Leach, the printer, who, in 1763, was arrested on a general warrant upon suspicion of having printed Wilkes's North Briton, No 45. Leach was taken out of his bed in the night, his papers were seized, and even his journeymen and servants were apprehended, the only foundation for the arrest being a hearsay that Wilkes had been seen going into Leach's house. Wilkes had been sent to the Tower for the No. 45. After much litigation, he obtained a verdict of £4,000, and Leach £300, damages from three of the king's messengers, who had executed the illegal warrant. Kearsley, the bookseller, of Fleet Street (whom we recollect by his tax-tables), had been taken up for publishing No. 45, when also at Kearsley's were seized the letters of Wilkes, which seemed to fix upon him the writing of the obscene and blasphemous "Essay on Woman," and of which he was convicted in the Court of King's Bench and expelled the House of Commons. The author of this "indecent patchwork" was not Wilkes (says Walpole), but Thomas Potter, the wild son of the learned Archbishop of Canterbury, who had tried to fix the authorship on the learned and arrogant Warburton--a piece of matchless impudence worthy of Wilkes himself.

Red Lion Court (No. 169), though an unlikely spot, has been, of all the side binns of Fleet Street, one of the most specially favoured by Minerva. Here Valpy published that interminable series of Latin and Greek authors, which he called the "Delphin Classics," which Lamb's eccentric friend, George Dyer, of Clifford's Inn, laboriously edited, and which opened the eyes of the subscribers very wide indeed as to the singular richness of ancient literature. At the press of an eminent printer in this court, that useful and perennial serial the Gentleman's Magazine (started in 1731) was partly printed from 1779 to 1781, and entirely printed from 1792 to 1820.

Johnson's Court, Fleet Street (a narrow court on the north side of Fleet Street, the fourth from Fetter Lane, eastward), was not named from Dr. Johnson, although inhabited by him.

Dr. Johnson was living at Johnson's Court in 1765, after he left No. 1, Inner Temple Lane, and before he removed to Bolt Court. At Johnson's Court he made the acquaintance of Murphey, and he worked at his edition of "Shakespeare." He saw much of Reynolds and Burke. On the accession of George III. a pension of £300 a year had been bestowed on him, and from that time he became comparatively an affluent man. In 1763, Boswell had become acquainted with Dr. Johnson, and from that period his wonderful conversations are recorded. The indefatigable biographer describes, in 1763, being taken by Mr. Levett to see Dr. Johnson's library, which was contained in his garret over his Temple chambers, where the son of the well-known Lintot used to have his warehouse. The floor was strewn with manuscript leaves; and there was an apparatus for chemical experiments, of which Johnson was all his life very fond. Johnson often hid himself in this garret for study, but never told his servant, as the Doctor would never allow him to say he was not at home when he was.

"He"(Johnson), says Hawkins, "removed from the Temple into a house in Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, and invited thither his friend Mrs. Williams. An upper room, which had the advantage of a good light and free air, he fitted up for a study and furnished with books, chosen with so little regard to editions or their external appearances as showed they were intended for use, and that he disdained the ostentation of learning."

"I returned to London," says Boswell, "in February, 1766, and found Dr. Johnson in a good house in Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, in which he had accommodated Mrs. Williams with an apartment on the ground-floor, while Mr. Levett occupied his post in the garret. His faithful Francis was still attending upon him. He received me with much kindness. The fragments of our first conversation, which I have preserved, are these:--I told him that Voltaire, in a conversation with me, had distinguished Pope and Dryden, thus: 'Pope drives a handsome chariot, with a couple of neat, trim nags; Dryden, a coach and six stately horses.' Johnson: 'Why, sir, the truth is, they both drive coaches and six, but Dryden's horses are either galloping or stumbling; Pope's go at a steady, even trot.' He said of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' which had been published in my absence, 'There's not been so fine a poem since Pope's time.' Dr. Johnson at the same time favoured me by marking the lines which he furnished to Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village,' which are only the last four:--

'That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the labour'd mole away; While self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the billows and the sky.'

At night I supped with him at the 'Mitre' tavern, that we might renew our social intimacy at the original place of meeting. But there was now considerable difference in his way of living. Having had an illness, in which he was advised to leave off wine, he had, from that period, continued to abstain from it, and drank only water or lemonade."

"Mr. Beauclerk and I," says Boswell, in another place, "called on him in the morning. As we walked up Johnson's Court, I said, 'I have a veneration for this court,' and was glad to find that Beauclerk had the same reverential enthusiasm." The Doctor's removal Boswell thus duly chronicles:--"Having arrived," he says, "in London late on Friday, the 15th of March, 1776, I hastened next morning to wait on Dr. Johnson, at his house, but found he was removed from Johnson's Court, No. 7, to Bolt Court, No. 8, still keeping to his favourite Fleet Street. My reflection at the time, upon this change, as marked in my journal, is as follows: 'I felt a foolish regret that he had left a court which bore his name; but it was not foolish to be affected with some tenderness of regard for a place in which I had seen him a great deal, from whence I had often issued a better and a happier man than when I went in; and which had often appeared to my imagination, while I trod its pavement in the solemn darkness of the night, to be sacred to wisdom and piety.'"

Johnson was living at Johnson's Court when he was introduced to George III., an interview in which he conducted himself, considering he was an ingrained Jacobite, with great dignity, self-respect, and good sense.

That clever, but most shameless and scurrilous, paper, John Bull, was started in Johnson's Court, at the close of 1820. Its specific and real object was to slander unfortunate Queen Caroline and to torment, stigmatise, and blacken "the Brandenburg House party," as her honest sympathisers were called. Theodore Hook was chosen editor, because he knew society, was quick, witty, satirical, and thoroughly unscrupulous. For his "splendid abuse"--as his biographer, the unreverend Mr. Barham, calls it--he received the full pay of a greedy hireling. Tom Moore and the Whigs now met with a terrible adversary. Hook did not hew or stab, like Churchill and the old rough lampooners of earlier days, but he filled crackers with wild fire, or laughingly stuck the enemies of George IV. over with pins. Hook had only a year before returned from the Treasuryship of the Mauritius, charged with a defalcation of £15,000--the result of the grossest and most culpable neglect. Hungry for money, as he had ever been, he was eager to show his zeal for the master who had hired his pen. Hook and Daniel Terry, the comedian, joined to start the new satirical paper; but Miller, a publisher in the Burlington Arcade, was naturally afraid of libel, and refused to have anything to do with the new venture. With Miller, as Hook said in his clever, punning way, all argument in favour of it proved Newgate-ory. Hook at first wanted to start a magazine upon the model of Blackwood, but the final decision was for a weekly newspaper, to be called John Bull, a title already discussed for a previous scheme by Hook and Elliston. The first number appeared on Saturday, December 16, 1820, in the publishing office, No. 11, Johnson's Court. The modest projectors only printed seven hundred and fifty copies of the first number, but the sale proved considerable. By the sixth week the sale had reached ten thousand weekly. The first five numbers were reprinted, and the first two actually stereotyped.

Hook's favourite axiom--worthy of such a satirist--was "that there was always a concealed wound in every family, and the point was to strike exactly at the source of pain." Hook's clerical elder brother, Dr. James Hook, the author of "Pen Owen" and other novels, and afterwards Dean of Worcester, assisted him; but Terry was too busy in what Sir Walter Scott, his great friend and sleeping partner, used to call "_Terry_fying the novelists by not very brilliant adaptations of their works." Dr. Maginn, summoned from Cork to edit a newspaper for Hook (who had bought up two dying newspapers for the small expenditure of three hundred guineas), wrote only one article for the Bull. Mr. Haynes Bayley contributed some of his graceful verses, and Ingoldsby (Barham) some of his rather ribald fun. The anonymous editor of John Bull became for a time as much talked about as Junius in earlier times. By many witty James Smith was suspected, but his fun had not malignity enough for the Tory purposes of those bitter days. Latterly Hook let Alderman Wood alone, and set all his staff on Hume, the great economist, and the Hon. Henry Grey Bennett.

Several prosecutions followed, says Mr. Barham, that for libel on the Queen among the rest; but the grand attempt on the part of the Whigs to crush the paper was not made till the 6th of May, 1821. A short and insignificant paragraph, containing some observations upon the Hon. Henry Grey Bennett, a brother of Lord Tankerville's, was selected for attack, as involving a breach of privilege; in consequence of which the printer, Mr. H.F. Cooper, the editor, and Mr. Shackell were ordered to attend at the bar of the House of Commons. A long debate ensued, during which Ministers made as fair a stand as the nature of the case would admit in behalf of their guerrilla allies, but which terminated at length in the committal of Cooper to Newgate, where he was detained from the 11th of May till the 11th of July, when Parliament was prorogued.

Meanwhile the most strenuous exertions were made to detect the real delinquents--for, of course, honourable gentlemen were not to be imposed upon by the unfortunate "men of straw" who had fallen into their clutches, and who, by the way, suffered for an offence of which their judges and accusers openly proclaimed them to be not only innocent, but incapable. The terror of imprisonment and the various arts of cross-examination proving insufficient to elicit the truth, recourse was had to a simpler and more conciliatory mode of treatment--bribery. The storm had failed to force off the editorial cloak--the golden beams were brought to bear upon it. We have it for certain that an offer was made to a member of the establishment to stay all impending proceedings, and, further, to pay down a sum of £500 on the names of the actual writers being given up. It was rejected with disdain, while such were the precautions taken that it was impossible to fix Hook, though suspicion began to be awakened, with any share in the concern. In order, also, to cross the scent already hit off, and announced by sundry deep-mouthed pursuers, the following "Reply"--framed upon the principle, we presume, that in literature, as in love, everything is fair--was thrown out in an early number:--

"MR. THEODORE HOOK.

"The conceit of some people is amazing, and it has not been unfrequently remarked that conceit is in abundance where talent is most scarce. Our readers will see that we have received a letter from Mr. Hook, disowning and disavowing all connection with this paper. Partly out of good nature, and partly from an anxiety to show the gentleman how little desirous we are to be associated with him, we have made a declaration which will doubtless be quite satisfactory to his morbid sensibility and affected squeamishness. We are free to confess that two things surprise us in this business; the first, that anything which we have thought worth giving to the public should have been mistaken for Mr. Hook's; and, secondly that such a person as Mr. Hook should think himself disgraced by a connection with John Bull."

For sheer impudence this, perhaps, may be admitted to "defy competition"; but in point of tact and delicacy of finish it falls infinitely short of a subsequent notice, a perfect gem of its class, added by way of clenching the denial:--

"We have received Mr. Theodore Hook's second letter. We are ready to confess that we may have appeared to treat him too unceremoniously, but we will put it to his own feelings whether the terms of his denial were not, in some degree, calculated to produce a little asperity on our part. We shall never be ashamed, however, to do justice, and we readily declare that we meant no kind of imputation on Mr. Hook's personal character."

The ruse answered for awhile, and the paper went on with unabated audacity.

The death of the Queen, in the summer of 1821, produced a decided alteration in the tone and temper of the paper. In point of fact its occupation was now gone. The main, if not the sole, object of its establishment had been brought about by other and unforeseen events. The combination it had laboured so energetically to thwart was now dissolved by a higher and resistless agency. Still, it is not to be supposed that a machine which brought in a profit of something above £4,000 per annum, half of which fell to the share of Hook, was to be lightly thrown up, simply because its original purpose was attained. The dissolution of the "League" did not exist then as a precedent. The Queen was no longer to be feared; but there were Whigs and Radicals enough to be held in check, and, above all, there was a handsome income to be realised.

"Latterly Hook's desultory nature made him wander from the Bull, which might have furnished the thoughtless and heartless man of pleasure with an income for life. The paper naturally lost sap and vigour, at once declined in sale, and sank into a mere respectable club-house and party organ." "Mr. Hook," says Barham, "received to the day of his death a fixed salary, but the proprietorship had long since passed into other hands."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

X. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES

Dr. Johnson in Bolt Court--His motley Household--His Life there--Still existing--The gallant "Lumber Troop"--Reform Bill Riots--Sir Claudius Hunter--Cobbett in Bolt Court--The Bird Boy--The Private Soldier--In the House--Dr. Johnson in Gough Square--Busy at the Dictionary--Goldsmith in Wine Office Court--Selling "The Vicar of Wakefield"--Goldsmith's Troubles--Wine Office Court--The Old "Cheshire Cheese."

Of all the nooks of London associated with the memory of that good giant of literature, Dr. Johnson, not one is more sacred to those who love that great and wise man than Bolt Court. To this monastic court Johnson came in 1776, and remained till that December day in 1784, when a procession of all the learned and worthy men who honoured him followed his body to its grave in the Abbey, near the feet of Shakespeare and by the side of Garrick. The great scholar, whose ways and sayings, whose rough hide and tender heart, are so familiar to us--thanks to that faithful parasite who secured an immortality by getting up behind his triumphal chariot--came to Bolt Court from Johnson's Court, whither he had flitted from Inner Temple Lane, where he was living when the young Scotch barrister who was afterwards his biographer first knew him. His strange household of fretful and disappointed almspeople seems as well known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor, (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these fretful and quarrelsome old maids Dr. Johnson has himself sketched, in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale:--"Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them." This Levett was a poor eccentric apothecary, whom Johnson supported, and who seems to have been a charitable man.

The annoyance of such a menagerie of angular oddities must have driven Johnson more than ever to his clubs, where he could wrestle with the best intellects of the day, and generally retire victorious. He had done nearly all his best work by this time, and was sinking into the sere and yellow leaf, not, like Macbeth, with the loss of honour, but with love, obedience, troops of friends, and golden opinions from all sorts of people. His Titanic labour, the Dictionary, he had achieved chiefly in Gough Square; his "Rasselas"--that grave and wise Oriental story--he had written in a few days, in Staple's Inn, to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. In Bolt Court he, however, produced his "Lives of the Poets," a noble compendium of criticism, defaced only by the bitter Tory depreciation of Milton, and injured by the insertion of many worthless and the omission of several good poets.

It is pleasant to think of some of the events that happened while Johnson lived in Bolt Court. Here he exerted himself with all the ardour of his nature to soothe the last moments of that wretched man, Dr. Dodd, who was hanged for forgery. From Bolt Court he made those frequent excursions to the Thrales, at Streatham, where the rich brewer and his brilliant wife gloried in the great London lion they had captured. To Bolt Court came Johnson's friends Reynolds and Gibbon, and Garrick, and Percy, and Langton; but poor Goldsmith had died before Johnson left Johnson's Court. To Bolt Court he stalked home the night of his memorable quarrel with Dr. Percy, no doubt regretting the violence and boisterous rudeness with which he had attacked an amiable and gifted man. From Bolt Court he walked to service at St. Clement's Church on the day he rejoiced in comparing the animation of Fleet Street with the desolation of the Hebrides. It was from Bolt Court Boswell drove Johnson to dine with General Paoli, a drive memorable for the fact that on that occasion Johnson uttered his first and only recorded pun.

Johnson was at Bolt Court when the Gordon Riots broke out, and he describes them to Mrs. Thrale. Boswell gives a pleasant sketch of a party at Bolt Court, when Mrs. Hall (a sister of Wesley) was there, and Mr. Allen, a printer; Johnson produced his silver salvers, and it was "a great day." It was on this occasion that the conversation fell on apparitions, and Johnson, always superstitious to the last degree, told the story of hearing his mother's voice call him one day at Oxford (probably at a time when his brain was overworked). On this great occasion also, Johnson, talked at by Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Williams at the same moment, gaily quoted the line from the Beggars' Opera,--

"But two at a time there's no mortal can bear,"

and Boswell playfully compared the great man to Captain Macheath. Imagine Mrs. Williams, old and peevish; Mrs. Hall, lean, lank, and preachy; Johnson, rolling in his chair like Polyphemus at a debate; Boswell, stooping forward on the perpetual listen; Mr. Levett, sour and silent; Frank, the black servant, proud of the silver salvers--and you have the group as in a picture.

In Bolt Court we find Johnson now returning from pleasant dinners with Wilkes and Garrick, Malone and Dr. Burney; now sitting alone over his Greek Testament, or praying with his black servant, Frank. We like to picture him on that Good Friday morning (1783), when he and Boswell, returning from service at St. Clement's, rested on the stone seat at the garden-door in Bolt Court, talking about gardens and country hospitality.

Then, finally, we come to almost the last scene of all, when the sick man addressed to his kind physician, Brocklesby, that pathetic passage of Shakespeare's,--

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain; And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?"

Round Johnson's dying bed gathered many wise and good men. To Burke he said, "I must be in a wretched state indeed, when your company would not be a delight to me." To another friend he remarked solemnly, but in his old grand manner, "Sir, you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance towards death." Nor did his old vehemence and humour by any means forsake him, for he described a man who sat up to watch him "as an idiot, sir; awkward as a turnspit when first put into the wheel, and sleepy as a dormouse." His remaining hours were spent in fervent prayer. The last words he uttered were those of benediction upon the daughter of a friend who came to ask his blessing.

Some years before Dr. Johnson's death, when the poet Rogers was a young clerk of literary proclivities at his father's bank, he one day stole surreptitiously to Bolt Court, to daringly show some of his fledgeling poems to the great Polyphemus of literature. He and young Maltby, an ancestor of the late Bishop of Durham, crept blushingly through the quiet court, and on arriving at the sacred door on the west side, ascended the steps and knocked at the door; but the awful echo of that knocker struck terror to the young débutants' hearts, and before Frank Barber, the Doctor's old negro footman, could appear, the two lads, like street-boys who had perpetrated a mischievous runaway knock, took to their heels and darted back into noisy Fleet Street. Mr. Jesse, who has collected so many excellent anecdotes, some even original, in his three large volumes on "London's Celebrated Characters and Places," says that the elder Mr. Disraeli, singularly enough, used in society to relate an almost similar adventure as a youth. Eager for literary glory, but urged towards the counter by his sober-minded relations, he enclosed some of his best verses to the celebrated Dr. Johnson, and modestly solicited from the terrible critic an opinion of their value. Having waited some time in vain for a reply, the ambitious Jewish youth at last (December 13, 1784) resolved to face the lion in his den, and rapping tremblingly (as his predecessor, Rogers), heard with dismay the knocker echo on the metal. We may imagine the feelings of the young votary at the shrine of learning, when the servant (probably Frank Barber), who slowly opened the door, informed him that Dr. Johnson had breathed his last only a few short hours before.

Mr. Timbs reminds us of another story of Dr. Johnson, which will not be out of place here. It is an excellent illustration of the keen sagacity and forethought of that great man's mind. One evening Dr. Johnson, looking from his dim Bolt Court window, saw the slovenly lamp-lighter of those days ascending a ladder (just as Hogarth has drawn him in the "Rake's Progress"), and fill the little receptacle in the globular lamp with detestable whale-oil. Just as he got down the ladder the dull light wavered out. Skipping up the ladder again, the son of Prometheus lifted the cover, thrust the torch he carried into the heated vapour rising from the wick, and instantly the ready flame sprang restored to life. "Ah," said the old seer, "one of these days the streets of London will be lighted by smoke."

Johnson's house (No. 8), according to Mr. Noble, was not destroyed by fire in 1819, as Mr. Timbs and other writers assert. The house destroyed was Bensley the printer's (next door to No. 8), the successor of Johnson's friend, Allen, who in 1772 published Manning's Saxon, Gothic, and Latin Dictionary, and died in 1780. In Bensley's destructive fire all the plates and stock of Dallaway's "History of Sussex" were consumed. Johnson's house, says Mr. Noble, was in 1858 purchased by the Stationers' Company, and fitted up as a cheap school (six shillings a quarter). In 1861 Mr. Foss, Master of the Company, initiated a fund, and since then a university scholarship has been founded--sicitur ad astra. The back room, first floor, in which the great man died, had been pulled down by Mr. Bensley, to make way for a staircase. Bensley was one of the first introducers of the German invention of steam-printing.

At "Dr. Johnson's" tavern, established forty years ago (now the Albert Club), the well-known society of the "Lumber Troop" once drained their porter and held their solemn smokings. This gallant force of supposititious fighting men "came out" with great force during the Reform Riots of 1830. These useless disturbances originated in a fussy, foolish warning letter, written by John Key, the Lord Mayor elect (he was generally known in the City as Don Key after this), to the Duke of Wellington, then as terribly unpopular with the English Reformers as he had been with the French after the battle of Waterloo, urging him (the duke) if he came with King William and Queen Adelaide to dine with the new Lord Mayor, (his worshipful self), to come "strongly and sufficiently guarded." This imprudent step greatly offended the people, who were also just then much vexed with the severities of Peel's obnoxious new police. The result was that the new king and queen (for the not over-beloved George IV. had only died in June of that year) thought it better to decline coming to the City festivities altogether. Great, then, was even the Tory indignation, and the fattest alderman trotted about, eager to discuss the grievance, the waste of half-cooked turtle, and the general folly and enormity of the Lord Mayor elect's conduct. Sir Claudius Hunter, who had shared in the Lord Mayor's fears, generously marched to his aid. In a published statement that he made, he enumerated the force available for the defence of the (in his mind) endangered City in the following way:--

Ward Constables 400 Fellowship, Ticket, and Tackle Porters 250 Firemen 150 Corn Porters 100 Extra men hired 130 City Police or own men 54 Tradesmen with emblems in the procession 300 Some gentlemen called the Lumber Troopers 150 The Artillery Company 150 The East India Volunteers 600

Total of all comers 2,284

In the same statement Sir Claudius says:--"The Lumber Troop are a respectable smoking club, well known to every candidate for a seat in Parliament for London, and most famed for the quantity of tobacco they consume and the porter they drink, which, I believe (from my own observation, made nineteen years ago, when I was a candidate for that office), is the only liquor allowed. They were to have had no pay, and I am sure they would have done their best."

Along the line of procession, to oppose this civic force, the right worshipful but foolish man reckoned there would be some 150,000 persons. With all these aldermanic fears, and all these irritating precautions, a riot naturally took place. On Monday, November 8th, that glib, unsatisfactory man, Orator Hunt, the great demagogue of the day, addressed a Reform meeting at the Rotunda, in Blackfriars Road. At half-past eleven, when the Radical gentleman, famous for his white hat (the lode-star of faction), retired, a man suddenly waved a tricolour flag (it was the year, remember, of the Revolution in Paris), with the word "Reform" painted upon it, and a preconcerted cry was raised by the more violent of, "Now for the West End!" About one thousand men then rushed over Blackfriars bridge, shouting, "Reform!" "Down with the police!" "No Peel!" "No Wellington!" Hurrying along the Strand, the mob first proceeded to Earl Bathurst's, in Downing Street. A foolish gentleman of the house, hearing the cries, came out on the balcony, armed with a brace of pistols, and declared he would fire on the first man who attempted to enter the place. Another gentleman at this moment came out, and very sensibly took the pistols from his friend, on which the mob retired. The rioters were then making for the House of Commons, but were stopped by a strong line of police, just arrived in time from Scotland Yard. One hundred and forty more men soon joined the constables, and a general fight ensued, in which many heads were quickly broken, and the Reform flag was captured. Three of the rioters were arrested, and taken to the watch-house in the Almonry in Westminster. A troop of Royal Horse Guards (blue) remained during the night ready in the court of the Horse Guards, and bands of policemen paraded the streets.

On Tuesday the riots continued. About half-past five p.m., 300 or 400 persons, chiefly boys, came along the Strand, shouting, "No Peel!" "Down with the raw lobsters!" (the new police); "This way, my lads; we'll give it them!" At the back of the menageries at Charing Cross the police rushed upon them, and after a skirmish put them to flight. At seven o'clock the vast crowd by Temple Bar compelled every coachman and passenger in a coach, as a passport, to pull off his hat and shout "Huzza!" Stones were thrown, and attempts were made to close the gates of the Bar. The City marshals, however, compelled them to be re-opened, and opposed the passage of the mob to the Strand, but the pass was soon forced. The rioters in Pickett Place pelted the police with stones and pieces of wood, broken from the scaffolding of the Law Institute, then building in Chancery Lane. Another mob of about 500 persons ran up Piccadilly to Apsley House and hissed and hooted the stubborn, unprogressive old Duke, Mr. Peel, and the police; the constables, however, soon dispersed them. The same evening dangerous mobs collected in Bethnal Green, Spitalfields, and Whitechapel, one party of them displaying tricoloured flags. They broke a lamp and a window or two, but did little else. Alas for poor Sir Claudius and his profound computations! His 2,284 fighting loyal men dwindled down to 600, including even those strange hybrids, the firemen-watermen; and as for the gallant Lumber Troop, they were nowhere visible to the naked eye.

To Bolt Court that scourge of King George III., William Cobbett, came from Fleet Street to sell his Indian corn, for which no one cared, and to print and publish his twopenny Political Register, for which the London Radicals of that day hungered. Nearly opposite the office of "this good hater," says Mr. Timbs, Wright (late Kearsley) kept shop, and published a searching criticism on Cobbett's excellent English Grammar as soon as it appeared. We only wonder that Cobbett did not reply to him as Johnson did to a friend after he knocked Osborne (the grubbing bookseller of Gray's Inn Gate) down with a blow--"Sir, he was impertinent, and I beat him."

A short biographical sketch of Cobbett will not be inappropriate here. This sturdy Englishman, born in the year 1762, was the son of an honest and industrious yeoman, who kept an inn called the "Jolly Farmer," at Farnham, in Surrey. "My first occupation," says Cobbett, "was driving the small birds from the turnip seed and the rooks from the peas. When I first trudged a-field with my wooden bottle and my satchel over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles." In 1783 the restless lad (a plant grown too high for the pot) ran away to London, and turned lawyer's clerk. At the end of nine months he enlisted, and sailed for Nova Scotia. Before long he became sergeant-major, over the heads of thirty other non-commissioned officers. Frugal and diligent, the young soldier soon educated himself. Discharged at his own request in 1791, he married a respectable girl, to whom he had before entrusted £150 hard-earned savings. Obtaining a trial against four officers of his late regiment for embezzlement of stores, for some strange reason Cobbett fled to France on the eve of the trial, but finding the king of that country dethroned, he started at once for America. At Philadelphia he boldly began as a high Tory bookseller, and denounced Democracy in his virulent "Porcupine Papers." Finally, overwhelmed with actions for libel, Cobbett in 1800 returned to England. Failing with a daily paper and a bookseller's shop, Cobbett then started his Weekly Register, which for thirty years continued to express the changes of his honest but impulsive and vindictive mind. Gradually--it is said, owing to some slight shown him by Pitt (more probably from real conviction)--Cobbett grew Radical and progressive, and in 1809 was fined £500 for libels on the Irish Government. In 1817 he was fined £1,000 and imprisoned two years for violent remarks about some Ely militiamen who had been flogged under a guard of fixed bayonets. This punishment he never forgave. He followed up his Register by his Twopenny Trash, of which he eventually sold 100,000 a number. The Six Acts being passed--as he boasted, to gag him--he fled, in 1817, again to America. The persecuted man returned to England in 1819, bringing with him, much to the amusement of the Tory lampooners, the bones of that foul man, Tom Paine, the infidel, whom (in 1796) this changeful politician had branded as "base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous." During the Queen Caroline trial Cobbett worked heart and soul for that questionable martyr. He went out to Shooter's Hill to welcome her to London, and boasted of having waved a laurel bough above her head.

In 1825 he wrote a scurrilous "History of the Reformation" (by many still attributed to a priest), in which he declared Luther, Calvin, and Beza to be the greatest ruffians that ever disgraced the world. In his old age, too late to be either brilliant or useful, Cobbett got into Parliament, being returned in 1832 (thanks to the Reform Bill) member for Oldham. He died at his house near Farnham, in 1835. Cobbett was an egotist, it must be allowed, and a violent-tempered, vindictive man; but his honesty, his love of truth and liberty, few who are not blinded by party opinion can doubt. His writings are remarkable for vigorous and racy Saxon, as full of vituperation as Rabelais's, and as terse and simple as Swift's.

Mr. Grant, in his pleasant book, "Random Recollections of the House of Commons," written circa 1834, gives us an elaborate full-length portrait of old Cobbett. He was, he says, not less than six feet high, and broad and athletic in proportion. His hair was silver-white, his complexion ruddy as a farmer's. Till his small eyes sparkled with laughter, he looked a mere dull-pated clodpole. His dress was a light, loose, grey tail-coat, a white waistcoat, and sandy kerseymere breeches, and he usually walked about the House with both his hands plunged into his breeches pockets. He had an eccentric, half-malicious way of sometimes suddenly shifting his seat, and on one important night, big with the fate of Peel's Administration, deliberately anchored down in the very centre of the disgusted Tories and at the very back of Sir Robert's bench, to the infinite annoyance of the somewhat supercilious party.

We next penetrate into Gough Square, in search of the great lexicographer.

As far as can be ascertained from Boswell, Dr. Johnson resided at Gough Square from 1748 to 1758, an eventful period of his life, and one of struggle, pain, and difficulty. In this gloomy side square near Fleet Street, he achieved many results and abandoned many hopes. Here he nursed his hypochondria--the nightmare of his life--and sought the only true relief in hard work. Here he toiled over books, drudging for Cave and Dodsley. Here he commenced both the Rambler and the Idler, and formed his acquaintance with Bennet Langton. Here his wife died, and left him more than ever a prey to his natural melancholy; and here he toiled on his great work, the Dictionary, in which he and six amanuenses effected what it took all the French Academicians to perform for their language.

A short epitome of what this great man accomplished while in Gough Square will clearly recall to our readers his way of life while in that locality. In 1749, Johnson formed a quiet club in Ivy Lane, wrote that fine paraphrase of Juvenal, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," and brought out, with dubious success, under Garrick's auspices, his tragedy of Irene. In 1750, he commenced the Rambler. In 1752, the year his wife died, he laboured on at the Dictionary. In 1753, he became acquainted with Bennet Langton. In 1754 he wrote the life of his early patron, Cave, who died that year. In 1755, the great Dictionary, begun in 1747, was at last published, and Johnson wrote that scathing letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, who, too late, thrust upon him the patronage the poor scholar had once sought in vain. In 1756, the still struggling man was arrested for a paltry debt of £5 18_s._, from which Richardson the worthy relieved him. In 1758, when he began the Idler, Johnson is described as "being in as easy and pleasant a state of existence as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to enjoy."

While the Dictionary was going forward, "Johnson," says Boswell, "lived part of the time in Holborn, part in Gough Square (Fleet Street); and he had an upper room fitted up like a counting-house for the purpose, in which he gave to the copyists their several tasks. The words, partly taken from other dictionaries and partly supplied by himself, having been first written down with space left between them, he delivered in writing their etymologies, definitions, and various significations. The authorities were copied from the books themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a black-lead pencil, the traces of which could be easily effaced. I have seen several of them in which that trouble had not been taken, so that they were just as when used by the copyists. It is remarkable that he was so attentive to the choice of the passages in which words were authorised, that one may read page after page of his Dictionary with improvement and pleasure; and it should not pass unobserved, that he has quoted no author whose writings had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality."

To this account Bishop Percy adds a note of great value for its lucid exactitude. "Boswell's account of the manner in which Johnson compiled his Dictionary," he says, "is confused and erroneous. He began his task (as he himself expressly described to me) by devoting his first care to a diligent perusal of all such English writers as were most correct in their language, and under every sentence which he meant to quote he drew a line, and noted in the margin the first letter of the word under which it was to occur. He then delivered these books to his clerks, who transcribed each sentence on a separate slip of paper and arranged the same under the word referred to. By these means he collected the several words, and their different significations, and when the whole arrangement was alphabetically formed, he gave the definitions of their meanings, and collected their etymologies from Skinner, and other writers on the subject." To these accounts, Hawkins adds his usual carping, pompous testimony. "Dr. Johnson," he says, "who, before this time, together with his wife, had lived in obscurity, lodging at different houses in the courts and alleys in and about the Strand and Fleet Street, had, for the purpose of carrying on this arduous work, and being near the printers employed in it, taken a handsome house in Gough Square, and fitted up a room in it with books and other accommodations for amanuenses, who, to the number of five or six, he kept constantly under his eye. An interleaved copy of "Bailey's Dictionary," in folio, he made the repository of the several articles, and these he collected by incessantly reading the best authors in our language, in the practice whereof his method was to score with a black-lead pencil the words by him selected. The books he used for this purpose were what he had in his own collection, a copious but a miserably ragged one, and all such as he could borrow; which latter, if ever they came back to those that lent them, were so defaced as to be scarce worth owning, and yet some of his friends were glad to receive and entertain them as curiosities."

"Mr. Burney," says Boswell, "during a visit to the capital, had an interview with Johnson in Gough Square, where he dined and drank tea with him, and was introduced to the acquaintance of Mrs. Williams. After dinner Mr. Johnson proposed to Mr. Burney to go up with him into his garret, which being accepted, he found there about five or six Greek folios, a poor writing-desk, and a chair and a half. Johnson, giving to his guest the entire seat, balanced himself on one with only three legs and one arm. Here he gave Mr. Burney Mrs. Williams's history, and showed him some notes on Shakespeare already printed, to prove that he was in earnest. Upon Mr. Burney's opening the first volume at the Merchant of Venice he observed to him that he seemed to be more severe on Warburton than on Theobald. 'Oh, poor Tib!' said Johnson, 'he was nearly knocked down to my hands; Warburton stands between me and him.' 'But, sir,' said Mr. Burney, 'You'll have Warburton on your bones, won't you? 'No, sir;' he'll not come out; he'll only growl in his den.' 'But do you think, sir, Warburton is a superior critic to Theobald?' 'Oh, sir, he'll make two-and-fifty Theobalds cut into slices! The worst of Warburton is that he has a rage for saying something when there's nothing to be said.' Mr. Burney then asked him whether he had seen the letter Warburton had written in answer to a pamphlet addressed 'to the most impudent man alive.' He answered in the negative. Mr. Burney told him it was supposed to be written by Mallet. A controversy now raged between the friends of Pope and Bolingbroke, and Warburton and Mallet were the leaders of the several parties. Mr. Burney asked him then if he had seen Warburton's book against Bolingbroke's philosophy!'No, sir; I have never read Bolingbroke's impiety, and therefore am not interested about its refutation.'"

Goldsmith appears to have resided at No. 6, Wine Office Court from 1760 to 1762, during which period he earned a precarious livelihood by writing for the booksellers.

They still point out Johnson and Goldsmith's favourite seats in the north-east corner of the window of that cozy though utterly unpretentious tavern, the "Cheshire Cheese," in this court.

It was while living in Wine Office Court that Goldsmith is supposed to have partly written that delightful novel "The Vicar of Wakefield," which he had begun at Canonbury Tower. We like to think that, seated at the "Cheese," he perhaps espied and listened to the worthy but credulous vicar and his gosling son attending to the profound theories of the learned and philosophic but shifty Mr. Jenkinson. We think now by the window, with a cross light upon his coarse Irish features, and his round prominent brow, we see the watchful poet sit eyeing his prey, secretly enjoying the grandiloquence of the swindler and the admiration of the honest country parson.

"One day," says Mrs. Piozzi, "Johnson was called abruptly from our house at Southwark, after dinner, and, returning in about three hours, said he had been with an enraged author, whose landlady pressed him within doors while the bailiffs beset him without; that he was drinking himself drunk with Madeira to drown care, and fretting over a novel which, when finished, was to be his whole fortune; but he could not get it done for distraction, nor dared he stir out of doors to offer it for sale. Mr. Johnson, therefore," she continues, "sent away the bottle and went to the bookseller, recommending the performance, and devising some immediate relief; which, when he brought back to the writer, the latter called the woman of the house directly to partake of punch and pass their time in merriment. It was not," she concludes, "till ten years after, I dare say, that something in Dr. Goldsmith's behaviour struck me with an idea that he was the very man; and then Johnson confessed that he was so."

"A more scrupulous and patient writer," says the admirable biographer of the poet, Mr. John Forster, "corrects some inaccuracies of the lively little lady, and professes to give the anecdote authentically from Johnson's own exact narration. 'I received one morning,' Boswell represents Johnson to have said, 'a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for £60. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.'"

The arrest is plainly connected with Newbery's reluctance to make further advances, and of all Mrs. Fleming's accounts found among Goldsmith's papers, the only one unsettled is that for the summer months preceding the arrest. The manuscript of the novel seems by both statements (in which the discrepancies are not so great but that Johnson himself may be held accountable for them) to have been produced reluctantly, as a last resource; and it is possible, as Mrs. Piozzi intimates, that it was still regarded as unfinished. But if strong adverse reasons had not existed, Johnson would surely have carried it to the elder Newbery. He did not do this. He went with it to Francis Newbery, the nephew; does not seem to have given a very brilliant account of the "merit" he had perceived in it--four years after its author's death he told Reynolds that he did not think it would have had much success--and rather with regard to Goldsmith's immediate want than to any confident sense of the value of the copy, asked and obtained the £60. "And, sir," he said afterwards, "a sufficient price, too, when it was sold, for then the fame of Goldsmith had not been elevated, as it afterwards was, by his 'Traveller,' and the bookseller had faint hopes of profit by his bargain. After 'The Traveller,' to be sure, it was accidentally worth more money."

On the poem, meanwhile, the elder Newbery had consented to speculate, and this circumstance may have made it hopeless to appeal to him with a second work of fancy. For, on that very day of the arrest, "The Traveller" lay completed in the poet's desk. The dream of eight years, the solace and sustainment of his exile and poverty, verged at last to fulfilment or extinction, and the hopes and fears which centred in it doubtless mingled on that miserable day with the fumes of the Madeira. In the excitement of putting it to press, which followed immediately after, the nameless novel recedes altogether from the view, but will reappear in due time. Johnson approved the verses more than the novel; read the proof-sheets for his friend; substituted here and there, in more emphatic testimony of general approval, a line of his own; prepared a brief but hearty notice for the Critical Review, which was to appear simultaneously with the poem, and, as the day of publication drew near, bade Goldsmith be of good heart.

Oliver Goldsmith came first to London in 1756, a raw Irish student, aged twenty-eight. He was just fresh from Italy and Switzerland. He had heard Voltaire talk, had won a degree at Louvaine or Padua, had been "bear leader" to the stingy nephew of a rich pawnbroker, and had played the flute at the door of Flemish peasants for a draught of beer and a crust of bread. No city of golden pavement did London prove to those worn and dusty feet. Almost a beggar had Oliver been, then an apothecary's journeyman and quack doctor, next a reader of proofs for Richardson, the novelist and printer; after that a tormented and jaded usher at a Peckham school; last, and worst of all, a hack writer of articles for Griffith's Monthly Review, then being opposed by Smollett in a rival publication. In Green Arbour Court Goldsmith spent the roughest part of the toilsome years before he became known to the world. There he formed an acquaintance with Johnson and his set, and wrote essays for Smollett's British Magazine.

Wine Office Court is supposed to have derived its name from an office where licenses to sell wine were formerly issued. "In this court," says Mr. Noble, "once flourished a fig tree, planted a century ago by the Vicar of St. Bride's, who resided, with an absence of pride suitable, if not common, to Christianity, at No. 12. It was a slip from another exile of a tree, formerly flourishing, in a sooty kind of grandeur, at the sign of the 'Fig Tree,' in Fleet Street. This tree was struck by lightning in 1820, but slips from the growing stump were planted in 1822, in various parts of England."

The old-fashioned and changeless character of the "Cheese," in whose low-roofed and sanded rooms Goldsmith and Johnson have so often hung up their cocked hats and sat down facing each other to a snug dinner, not unattended with punch, has been capitally sketched by a modern essayist, who possesses a thorough knowledge of the physiology of London. In an admirable paper entitled "Brain Street," Mr. George Augustus Sala thus describes Wine Office Court and the "Cheshire Cheese":--

"The vast establishments," says Mr. Sala, "of Messrs. Pewter & Antimony, typefounders (Alderman Antimony was Lord Mayor in the year '46); of Messrs. Quoin, Case, & Chappell, printers to the Board of Blue Cloth; of Messrs. Cutedge & Treecalf, bookbinders; with the smaller industries of Scawper & Tinttool, wood-engravers; and Treacle, Gluepot, & Lampblack, printing-roller makers, are packed together in the upper part of the court as closely as herrings in a cask. The 'Cheese' is at the Brain Street end. It is a little lop-sided, wedged-up house, that always reminds you, structurally, of a high-shouldered man with his hands in his pockets. It is full of holes and corners and cupboards and sharp turnings; and in ascending the stairs to the tiny smoking-room you must tread cautiously, if you would not wish to be tripped up by plates and dishes, momentarily deposited there by furious waiters. The waiters at the 'Cheese' are always furious. Old customers abound in the comfortable old tavern, in whose sanded-floored eating-rooms a new face is a rarity; and the guests and the waiters are the oldest of familiars. Yet the waiter seldom fails to bite your nose off as a preliminary measure when you proceed to pay him. How should it be otherwise when on that waiter's soul there lies heavy a perpetual sense of injury caused by the savoury odour of steaks, and 'muts' to follow; of cheese-bubbling in tiny tins--the 'specialty' of the house; of floury potatoes and fragrant green peas; of cool salads, and cooler tankards of bitter beer; of extra-creaming stout and 'goes' of Cork and 'rack,' by which is meant gin; and, in the winter-time, of Irish stew and rump-steak pudding, glorious and grateful to every sense? To be compelled to run to and fro with these succulent viands from noon to late at night, without being able to spare time to consume them in comfort--where do waiters dine, and when, and how?--to be continually taking other people's money only for the purpose of handing it to other people--are not these grievances sufficient to cross-grain the temper of the mildest-mannered waiter? Somebody is always in a passion at the 'Cheese:' either a customer, because there is not fat enough on his 'point'-steak, or because there is too much bone in his mutton-chop; or else the waiter is wrath with the cook; or the landlord with the waiter, or the barmaid with all. Yes, there is a barmaid at the 'Cheese,' mewed up in a box not much bigger than a birdcage, surrounded by groves of lemons, 'ones' of cheese, punch-bowls, and cruets of mushroom-catsup. I should not care to dispute with her, lest she should quoit me over the head with a punch-ladle, having a William-the-Third guinea soldered in the bowl.

"Let it be noted in candour that Law finds its way to the 'Cheese' as well as Literature; but the Law is, as a rule, of the non-combatant and, consequently, harmless order. Literary men who have been called to the bar, but do not practise; briefless young barristers, who do not object to mingling with newspaper men; with a sprinkling of retired solicitors (amazing dogs these for old port-wine; the landlord has some of the same bin which served as Hippocrene to Judge Blackstone when he wrote his 'Commentaries')--these make up the legal element of the 'Cheese.' Sharp attorneys in practice are not popular there. There is a legend that a process-server once came in at a back door to serve a writ; but being detected by a waiter, was skilfully edged by that wary retainer into Wine Bottle Court, right past the person on whom he was desirous to inflict the 'Victoria, by the grace, &c.' Once in the court, he was set upon by a mob of inky-faced boys just released from the works of Messrs. Ball, Roller, & Scraper, machine printers, and by the skin of his teeth only escaped being converted into 'pie.'"

Mr. William Sawyer has also written a very admirable sketch of the "Cheese" and its old-fashioned, conservative ways, which we cannot resist quoting:--

"We are a close, conservative, inflexible body--we, the regular frequenters of the 'Cheddar,'" says Mr. Sawyer. "No new-fangled notions, new usages, new customs, or new customers for us. We have our history, our traditions, and our observances, all sacred and inviolable. Look around! There is nothing new, gaudy, flippant, or effeminately luxurious here. A small room with heavily-timbered windows. A low planked ceiling. A huge, projecting fire-place, with a great copper boiler always on the simmer, the sight of which might have roused even old John Willett, of the 'Maypole,' to admiration. High, stiff-backed, inflexible 'settles,' hard and grainy in texture, box off the guests, half-a-dozen each to a table. Sawdust covers the floor, giving forth that peculiar faint odour which the French avoid by the use of the vine sawdust with its pleasant aroma. The only ornament in which we indulge is a solitary picture over the mantelpiece, a full-length of a now departed waiter, whom in the long past we caused to be painted, by subscription of the whole room, to commemorate his virtues and our esteem. He is depicted in the scene of his triumphs--in the act of giving change to a customer. We sit bolt upright round our tables, waiting, but not impatient. A time-honoured solemnity is about to be observed, and we, the old stagers, is it for us to precipitate it? There are men in this room who have dined here every day for a quarter of a century--aye, the whisper goes that one man did it even on his wedding-day! In all that time the more staid and well-regulated among us have observed a steady regularity of feeding. Five days in the week we have our 'Rotherham steak'--that mystery of mysteries--or our 'chop and chop to follow,' with the indispensable wedge of Cheddar--unless it is preferred stewed or toasted--and on Saturday decorous variety is afforded in a plate of the world-renowned 'Cheddar' pudding. It is of this latter luxury that we are now assembled to partake, and that with all fitting ceremony and observance. As we sit, like pensioners in hall, the silence is broken only by a strange sound, as of a hardly human voice, muttering cabalistic words, 'Ullo mul lum de loodle wumble jum!' it cries, and we know that chops and potatoes are being ordered for some benighted outsider, ignorant of the fact that it is pudding-day."

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XI. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES--SHOE LANE

The First Lucifers--Perkins' Steam Gun--A Link between Shakespeare and Shoe Lane--Florio and his Labours--"Cogers' Hall"--Famous "Cogers"--A Saturday Night's Debate--Gunpowder Alley--Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier Poet--"To Althea, from Prison"--Lilly the Astrologer, and his Knaveries--A Search for Treasure with Davy Ramsay--Hogarth in Harp Alley--The "Society of Sign Painters"--Hudson, the Song Writer--"Jack Robinson"--The Bishop's Residence--Bangor House--A Strange Story of Unstamped Newspapers--Chatterton's Death--Curious Legend of his Burial--A well-timed Joke.

At the east corner of Peterborough Court (says Mr. Timbs) was one of the earliest shops for the instantaneous light apparatus, "Hertner's Eupyrion" (phosphorus and oxymuriate matches, to be dipped in sulphuric acid and asbestos), the costly predecessor of the lucifer match. Nearly opposite were the works of Jacob Perkins, the engineer of the steam gun exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery, Strand, and which the Duke of Wellington truly foretold would never be advantageously employed in battle.

One golden thread of association links Shakespeare to Shoe Lane. Slight and frail is the thread, yet it has a double strand. In this narrow side-aisle of Fleet Street, in 1624, lived John Florio, the compiler of our first Italian dictionary. Now it is more than probable that our great poet knew this industrious Italian, as we shall presently show. Florio was a Waldensian teacher, no doubt driven to England by religious persecution. He taught French and Italian with success at Oxford, and finally was appointed tutor to that generous-minded, hopeful, and unfortunate Prince Henry, son of James I. Florio's "Worlde of Wordes" (a most copious and exact dictionary in Italian and English) was printed in 1598, and published by Arnold Hatfield for Edward Church, and "sold at his shop over against the north door of Paul's Church." It is dedicated to "The Right Honourable Patrons of Virtue, Patterns of Honour, Roger Earle of Rutland, Henrie Earle of Southampton, and Lucie Countess of Bedford." In the dedication, worthy of the fantastic author of "Euphues" himself, the author says:--"My hope springs out of three stems--your Honours' naturall benignitie; your able emploiment of such servitours; and the towardly like-lie-hood of this springall to do you honest service. The first, to vouchsafe all; the second, to accept this; the third, to applie it selfe to the first and second. Of the first, your birth, your place, and your custome; of the second, your studies, your conceits, and your exercise; of the thirde, my endeavours, my proceedings, and my project giues assurance. Your birth, highly noble, more than gentle; your place, above others, as in degree, so in height of bountie, and other vertues; your custome, never wearie of well doing; your studies much in all, most in Italian excellence; your conceits, by understanding others to worke above them in your owne; your exercise, to reade what the world's best writers have written, and to speake as they write. My endeavour, to apprehend the best, if not all; my proceedings, to impart my best, first to your Honours, then to all that emploie me; my proiect in this volume to comprehend the best and all, in truth, I acknowledge an entyre debt, not only of my best knowledge, but of all, yea, of more than I know or can, to your bounteous lordship, most noble, most vertuous, and most Honorable Earle of Southampton, in whose paie and patronage I haue liued some yeeres; to whom I owe and vowe the yeeres I haue to live.... Good parts imparted are not empaired; your springs are first to serue yourself, yet may yeelde your neighbours sweete water; your taper is to light you first, and yet it may light your neighbour's candle.... Accepting, therefore, of the childe, I hope your Honors' wish as well to the Father, who to your Honors' all deuoted wisheth meede of your merits, renowne of your vertues, and health of your persons, humblie with gracious leave kissing your thrice-honored hands, protesteth to continue euer your Honors' most humble and bounden in true seruice, JOHN FLORIO."

And now to connect Florio with Shakespeare. The industrious Savoyard, besides his dictionary--of great use at a time when the tour to Italy was a necessary completion of a rich gallant's education--translated the essays of that delightful old Gascon egotist, Montaigne. Now in a copy of Florio's "Montaigne" there was found some years ago one of the very few genuine Shakespeare signatures. Moreover, as Florio speaks of the Earl of Southampton as his steady patron, we may fairly presume that the great poet, who must have been constantly at Southampton's house, often met there the old Italian master. May not the bard in those conversations have perhaps gathered some hints for the details of Cymbeline, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and had his attention turned by the old scholar to fresh chapters of Italian story?

No chronicle of Shoe Lane would be complete without some mention of the "Cogers' Discussion Hall," formerly at No. 10. This useful debating society--a great resort for local politicians--was founded by Mr. Daniel Mason as long ago as 1755, and among its most eminent members it glories in the names of John Wilkes, Judge Keogh, Daniel O'Connell, and the eloquent Curran. The word "Coger" does not imply codger, or a drinker of cogs, but comes from cogite, to cogitate. The Grand, Vice-Grand, and secretary were elected on the night of every 14th of June by show of hands. The room was open to strangers, but the members had the right to speak first. The society was Republican in the best sense, for side by side with master tradesmen, shopmen, and mechanics, reporters and young barristers gravely sipped their grog, and abstractedly emitted wreathing columns of tobacco-smoke from their pipes. Mr. J. Parkinson has sketched the little parliament very pleasantly in the columns of a contemporary.

"A long low room," says the writer, "like the saloon of a large steamer. Wainscoat dimmed and ornaments tarnished by tobacco-smoke and the lingering dews of steaming compounds. A room with large niches at each end, like shrines for full-grown saints, one niche containing 'My Grand' in a framework of shabby gold, the other 'My Grand's Deputy' in a bordering more substantial. More than one hundred listeners are wating patiently for My Grand's utterances this Saturday night, and are whiling away the time philosophically with bibulous and nicotian refreshment. The narrow tables of the long room are filled with students and performers, and quite a little crowd is congregated at the door and in a room adjacent until places can be found for them in the presence-chamber. 'Established 1755' is inscribed on the ornamental signboard above us, and 'Instituted 1756' on another signboard near. Dingy portraits of departed Grands and Deputies decorate the walls. Punctually at nine My Grand opens the proceedings amid profound silence. The deputy buries himself in his newspaper, and maintains as profound a calm as the Speaker 'in another place.' The most perfect order is preserved. The Speaker or deputy, who seems to know all about it, rolls silently in his chair: he is a fat dark man, with a small and rather sleepy eye, such as I have seen come to the surface and wink lazily at the fashionable people clustered round a certain tank in the Zoological Gardens. He re-folds his newspaper from time to time until deep in the advertisements. The waiters silently remove empty tumblers and tankards, and replace them full. But My Grand commands profound attention from the room, and a neighbour, who afterwards proved a perfect Boanerges in debate, whispered to us concerning his vast attainments and high literary position.

"This chieftain of the Thoughtful Men is, we learn, the leading contributor to a newspaper of large circulation, and, under his signature of 'Locksley Hall,' rouses the sons of toil to a sense of the dignity and rights of labour, and exposes the profligacy and corruption of the rich to the extent of a column and a quarter every week. A shrewd, hard-headed man of business, with a perfect knowledge of what he had to do, and with a humorous twinkle of the eye, My Grand went steadily through his work, and gave the Thoughtful Men his epitome of the week's intelligence. It seemed clear that the Cogers had either not read the newspapers, or liked to be told what they already knew. They listened with every token of interest to facts which had been published for days, and it seemed difficult to understand how a debate could be carried on when the text admitted so little dispute. But we sadly underrated the capacity of the orators near us. The sound of My Grand's last sentence had not died out when a fresh-coloured, rather aristocratic-looking elderly man, whose white hair was carefully combed and smoothed, and whose appearance and manner suggested a very different arena to the one he waged battle in now, claimed the attention of the Thoughtful ones. Addressing 'Mee Grand' in the rich and unctuous tones which a Scotchman and Englishman might try for in vain, this orator proceeded, with every profession of respect, to contradict most of the chief's statements, to ridicule his logic, and to compliment him with much irony on his overwhelming goodness to the society 'to which I have the honour to belong. Full of that hard northern logic' (much emphasis on 'northern,' which was warmly accepted as a hit by the room)--'that hard northern logic which demonstrates everything to its own satisfaction; abounding in that talent which makes you, sir, a leader in politics, a guide in theology, and generally an instructor of the people; yet even you, sir, are perhaps, if I may say so, somewhat deficient in the lighter graces of pathos and humour. Your speech, sir, has commanded the attention of the room. Its close accuracy of style, its exactitude of expression, its consistent argument, and its generally transcendant ability will exercise, I doubt not, an influence which will extend far beyond this chamber, filled as this chamber is by gentlemen of intellect and education, men of the time, who both think and feel, and who make their feelings and their thoughts felt by others. Still, sir,' and the orator smiles the smile of ineffable superiority, 'grateful as the members of the society you have so kindly alluded to ought to be for your countenance and patronage, it needed not' (turning to the Thoughtful Men generally, with a sarcastic smile)--'it needed not even Mee Grand's encomiums to endear this society to its people, and to strengthen their belief in its efficacy in time of trouble, its power to help, to relieve, and to assuage. No, Mee Grand, an authoritee whose dictum even you will accept without dispute--mee Lord Macaulee--that great historian whose undying pages record those struggles and trials of constitutionalism in which the Cogers have borne no mean part--me Lord Macaulee mentions, with a respect and reverence not exceeded by Mee Grand's utterances of to-night' (more smiles of mock humility to the room) 'that great association which claims me as an unworthy son. We could, therefore, have dispensed with the recognition given us by Mee Grand; we could afford to wait our time until the nations of the earth are fused by one common wish for each other's benefit, when the principles of Cogerism are spread over the civilised world, when justice reigns supreme, and loving-kindness takes the place of jealousy and hate.' We looked round the room while these fervid words were being triumphantly rolled forth, and were struck with the calm impassiveness of the listeners. There seemed to be no partisanship either for the speaker or the Grand. Once, when the former was more than usually emphatic in his denunciations, a tall pale man, with a Shakespeare forehead, rose suddenly, with a determined air, as if about to fiercely interrupt; but it turned out he only wanted to catch the waiter's eye, and this done, he pointed silently to his empty glass, and remarked, in a hoarse whisper, 'Without sugar, as before.'"

Gunpowder Alley, a side-twig of Shoe Lane, leads us to the death-bed of an unhappy poet, poor Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier, who, dying here two years before the "blessed" Restoration, in a very mean lodging, was buried at the west end of St. Bride's Church. The son of a knight, and brought up at Oxford, Anthony Wood describes the gallant and hopeful lad at sixteen, when presented at the Court of Charles I., as "the most amiable and beautiful youth that eye ever beheld. A person, also, of innate modesty, virtue, and courtly deportment, which made him then, but specially after, when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex." Presenting a daring petition from Kent in favour of the king, the Cavalier poet was thrown into prison by the Long Parliament, and was released only to waste his fortune in Royalist plots. He served in the French army, raised a regiment for Louis XIII., and was left for dead at Dunkirk. On his return to England, he found Lucy Sacheverell--his "Lucretia," the lady of his love--married, his death having been reported. All went ill. He was again imprisoned, grew penniless, had to borrow, and fell into a consumption from despair for love and loyalty. "Having consumed all his estate," says Anthony Wood, "he grew very melancholy, which at length brought him into a consumption; became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged clothes (whereas when he was in his glory he wore cloth of gold and silver), and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars than poorest of servants." There is a doubt, however, as to whether Lovelace died in such abject poverty, poor, dependent, and unhappy as he might have been. Lovelace's verse is often strained, affected, and wanting in judgment; but at times he mounts a bright-winged Pegasus, and with plume and feather flying, tosses his hand up, gay and chivalrous as Rupert's bravest. His verses to Lucy Sacheverell, on leaving her for the French camp, are worthy of Montrose himself. The last two lines--

"I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov'd I not honour more"--

contain the thirty-nine articles of a soldier's faith. And what Wildrake could have sung in the Gate House or the Compter more gaily of liberty than Lovelace, when he wrote,--

"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty"?

Whenever we read the verse that begins,--

"When love, with unconfinèd wings, Hovers within my gates, And my divine Althea brings, To whisper at my grates,"

the scene rises before us--we see a fair pale face, with its aureole of golden hair gleaming between the rusty bars of the prison door, and the worn visage of the wounded Cavalier turning towards it as the flower turns to the sun. And surely Master Wildrake himself, with his glass of sack half-way to his mouth, never put it down to sing a finer Royalist stave than Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison,"--

"When, linnet-like, confined, I With shriller note shall sing The mercy, sweetness, majesty, And glories of my king; When I shall voice aloud how good He is, how great should be, Th' enlarged winds that curl the flood Know no such liberty."

In the Cromwell times there resided in Gunpowder Alley, probably to the scorn of poor dying Lovelace, that remarkable cheat and early medium, Lilly the astrologer, the Sidrophel of "Hudibras." This rascal, who supplied the King and Parliament alternately with equally veracious predictions, was in youth apprenticed to a mantua-maker in the Strand, and on his master's death married his widow. Lilly studied astrology under one Evans, an ex-clergyman, who told fortunes in Gunpowder Alley. Besotted by the perusal of Cornelius Agrippa and other such trash, Lilly, found fools plenty, and the stars, though potent in their spheres, unable to contradict his lies. This artful cheat was consulted as to the most propitious day and hour for Charles's escape from Carisbrook, and was even sent for by the Puritan generals to encourage their men before Colchester. Lilly was a spy of the Parliament, yet at the Restoration professed to disclose the fact that Cornet Joyce had beheaded Charles. Whenever his predictions or his divining-rod failed, he always attributed his failures, as the modern spiritualists, the successors of the old wizards, still conveniently do, to want of faith in the spectators. By means of his own shrewdness, rather than by stellar influence, Lilly obtained many useful friends, among whom we may specially particularise the King of Sweden, Lenthal the Puritan Speaker, Bulstrode Whitelocke (Cromwell's Minister), and the learned but credulous Elias Ashmole. Lilly's Almanac, the predecessor of Moore's and Zadkiel's, was carried on by him for six-and-thirty years. He claimed to be a special protégé of an angel called Salmonæus, and to have a more than bowing acquaintance with Salmael and Malchidael, the guardian angels of England. Among his works are his autobiography, and his "Observations on the Life and Death of Charles, late King of England." The rest of his effusions are pretentious, mystical, muddle-headed rubbish, half nonsense half knavery, as "The White King's Prophecy," "Supernatural Light," "The Starry Messenger," and "Annus Tenebrosus, or the Black Year." The rogue's starry mantle descended on his adopted son, a tailor, whom he named Merlin, junior. The credulity of the atheistical times of Charles II. is only equalled by that of our own day.

Lilly himself, in his amusing, half-knavish autobiography, has described his first introduction to the Welsh astrologer of Gunpowder Alley:--

"It happened," he says, "on one Sunday, 1632, as myself and a justice of peace's clerk were, before service, discoursing of many things, he chanced to say that such a person was a great scholar--nay, so learned that he could make an almanac, which to me then was strange; one speech begot another, till, at last, he said he could bring me acquainted with one Evans, in Gunpowder Alley, who had formerly lived in Staffordshire, that was an excellent wise man, and studied the black art. The same week after we went to see Mr. Evans. When we came to his house, he, having been drunk the night before, was upon his bed, if it be lawful to call that a bed whereon he then lay. He roused up himself, and after some compliments he was content to instruct me in astrology. I attended his best opportunities for seven or eight weeks, in which time I could set a figure perfectly. Books he had not any, except Haly, 'De Judiciis Astrorum,' and Orriganus's 'Ephemerides;' so that as often as I entered his house I thought I was in the wilderness. Now, something of the man. He was by birth a Welshman, a master of arts, and in sacred orders. He had formerly had a cure of souls in Staffordshire, but now was come to try his fortunes at London, being in a manner enforced to fly, for some offences very scandalous committed by him in those parts where he had lately lived; for he gave judgment upon things lost, the only shame of astrology. He was the most saturnine person my eye ever beheld, either before I practised or since; of a middle stature, broad forehead, beetle-browed, thick shoulders, flat-nosed, full lips, down-looked, black, curling, stiff hair, splay-footed. To give him his right, he had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would willingly give contrary judgments; was much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome; seldom without a black eye or one mischief or other. This is the same Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof he chiefly subsisted. He understood Latin very well, the Greek tongue not all; he had some arts above and beyond astrology, for he was well versed in the nature of spirits, and had many times used the circular way of invocating, as in the time of our familiarity he told me."

One of Lilly's most impudent attempts to avail himself of demoniacal assistance was when he dug for treasure (like Scott's Dousterswivel) with David Ramsay (Scott again), one stormy night, in the cloisters at Westminster.

"Davy Ramsay," says the arch rogue, "his majesty's clockmaker, had been informed that there was a great quantity of treasure buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey; he acquaints Dean Williams therewith, who was also then Bishop of Lincoln; the dean gave him liberty to search after it, with this proviso, that if any was discovered his church should have a share of it. Davy Ramsay finds out one John Scott,[4] who pretended the use of the Mosaical rods, to assist him therein. I was desired to join with him, unto which I consented. One winter's night Davy Ramsay,[5] with several gentlemen, myself, and Scott, entered the cloisters; upon the west side of the cloisters the rods turned one over another, an argument that the treasure was there. The labourers digged at least six feet deep, and then we met with a coffin, but in regard it was not heavy, we did not open, which we afterwards much repented. From the cloisters we went into the abbey church, where upon a sudden (there being no wind when we began) so fierce, so high, so blustering and loud a wind did rise, that we verily believed the west-end of the church would have fallen upon us; our rods would not move at all; the candles and torches, all but one, were extinguished, or burned very dimly. John Scott, my partner, was amazed, looked pale, knew not what to think or do, until I gave directions and command to dismiss the demons, which when done all was quiet again, and each man returned unto his lodging late, about twelve o'clock at night. I could never since be induced to join with any in such-like actions.

"The true miscarriage of the business was by reason of so many people being present at the operation, for there was about thirty--some laughing, others deriding us; so that if we had not dismissed the demons, I believe most part of the abbey church had been blown down. Secrecy and intelligent operators, with a strong confidence and knowledge of what they are doing, are best for this work."

In the last century, when every shop had its sign and London streets were so many out-of-door picture-galleries, a Dutchman named Vandertrout opened a manufactory of these pictorial advertisements in Harp Alley, Shoe Lane, a dirty passage now laid open to the sun and air on the east side of the new transverse street running from Ludgate Hill to Holborn. In ridicule of the spurious black, treacly old masters then profusely offered for sale by the picture-dealers of the day, Hogarth and Bonnell Thornton opened an exhibition of shop-signs. In Nicholls and Stevens' "Life of Hogarth" there is a full and racy account of this sarcastic exhibition:--"At the entrance of the large passage-room was written, 'N.B. That the merit of the modern masters may be fairly examined into, it has been thought proper to place some admired works of the most eminent old masters in this room, and along the passage through the yard.' Among these are 'A Barge' in still life, by Vandertrout. He cannot be properly called an English artist; but not being sufficiently encouraged in his own country, he left Holland with William the Third, and was the first artist who settled in Harp Alley. An original half-length of Camden, the great historian and antiquary, in his herald's coat; by Vandertrout. As this artist was originally colour-grinder to Hans Holbein, it is conjectured there are some of that great master's touches in this piece. 'Nobody, alias Somebody,' a character. (The figure of an officer, all head, arms, legs, and thighs. This piece has a very odd effect, being so drolly executed that you do not miss the body.) 'Somebody, alias Nobody,' a caricature, its companion; both these by Hagarty. (A rosy figure, with a little head and a huge body, whose belly sways over almost quite down to his shoe-buckles. By the staff in his hand, it appears to be intended to represent a constable. It might else have been intended for an eminent justice of peace.) 'A Perspective View of Billingsgate, or Lectures on Elocution;' and 'The True Robin Hood Society, a Conversation or Lectures on Elocution,' its companion; these two by Barnsley. (These two strike at a famous lecturer on elocution and the reverend projector of a rhetorical academy, are admirably conceived and executed, and--the latter more especially--almost worthy the hand of Hogarth. They are full of a variety of droll figures, and seem, indeed, to be the work of a great master struggling to suppress his superiority of genius, and endeavouring to paint down to the common style and manner of sign-painting.)

"At the entrance to the grand room:--'The Society of Sign Painters take this opportunity of refuting a most malicious suggestion that their exhibition is designed as a ridicule on the exhibitions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, &c., and of the artists. They intend theirs only as an appendix or (in the style of painters) a companion to the other. There is nothing in their collection which will be understood by any candid person as a reflection on anybody, or any body of men. They are not in the least prompted by any mean jealousy to depreciate the merit of their brother artists. Animated by the same public spirit, their sole view is to convince foreigners, as well as their own blinded countrymen, that however inferior this nation may be unjustly deemed in other branches of the polite arts, the palm for sign-painting must be ceded to us, the Dutch themselves not excepted.' Projected in 1762 by Mr. Bonnel Thornton, of festive memory; but I am informed that he contributed no otherwise towards this display than by a few touches of chalk. Among the heads of distinguished personages, finding those of the King of Prussia and the Empress of Hungary, he changed the cast of their eyes, so as to make them leer significantly at each other. Note.--These (which in the catalogue are called an original portrait of the present Emperor of Prussia and ditto of the Empress Queen of Hungary, its antagonist) were two old signs of the "Saracen's Head" and Queen Anne. Under the first was written 'The Zarr,' and under the other 'The Empress Quean.' They were lolling their tongues out at each other; and over their heads ran a wooden label, inscribed, 'The present state of Europe.'

"In 1762 was published, in quarto, undated, 'A Catalogue of the Original Paintings, Busts, and Carved Figures, &c. &c., now Exhibiting by the Society of Sign-painters, at the Large Room, the upper end of Bow Street, Covent Garden, nearly opposite the Playhouse.'"

At 98, Shoe Lane lived, now some fifty years ago, a tobacconist named Hudson, a great humorist, a fellow of infinite fancy, and the writer of half the comic songs that once amused festive London. Hudson afterwards, we believe, kept the "Kean's Head" tavern, in Russell Court, Drury Lane, and about 1830 had a shop of some kind or other in Museum Street, Bloomsbury. Hudson was one of those professional song-writers and vocalists who used to be engaged to sing at such supper-rooms and theatrical houses as Offley's, in Henrietta Street (north-west end), Covent Garden; the "Coal Hole," in the Strand; and the "Cider Cellars," Maiden Lane. Sitting among the company, Hudson used to get up at the call of the chairman and "chant" one of his lively and really witty songs. The platform belongs to "Evans's" and a later period. Hudson was at his best long after Captain Morris's day, and at the time when Moore's melodies were popular. Many of the melodies Hudson parodied very happily, and with considerable tact and taste. Many of Hudson's songs, such as "Jack Robinson" (infinitely funnier than most of Dibdin's), became coined into catch-words and street sayings of the day. "Before you could say Jack Robinson" is a phrase, still current, derived from this highly droll song. The verse in which Jack Robinson's "engaged" apologises for her infidelity is as good as anything that James Smith ever wrote. To the returned sailor,--

"Says the lady, says she, 'I've changed my state.' 'Why, you don't mean,' says Jack, 'that you've got a mate? You know you promised me.' Says she, 'I couldn't wait, For no tidings could I gain of you, Jack Robinson. And somebody one day came to me and said That somebody else had somewhere read, In some newspaper, that you was somewhere dead.'-- 'I've not been dead at all,' says Jack Robinson."

Another song, "The Spider and the Fly," is still often sung; and "Going to Coronation" is by no means forgotten in Yorkshire. "There was a Man in the West Countrie" figures in most current collections of songs. Hudson particularly excelled in stage-Irishman songs, which were then popular; and some of these, particularly one that ends with the refrain, "My brogue and my blarney and bothering ways," have real humour in them. Many of these Irish songs were written for and sung by the late Mr. Fitzwilliam, the comedian, as others of Hudson's songs were by Mr. Rayner. Collectors of comic ditties will not readily forget "Walker, the Twopenny Postman," or "The Dogs'-meat Man"--rough caricatures of low life, unstained by the vulgarity of many of the modern music-hall ditties. In the motto to one of his collections of poems, Hudson borrows from Churchill an excuse for the rough, humorous effusions that he scattered broadcast over the town,--

"When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen, Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down; Rough as they run, discharge them on the town. Hence rude, unfinished brats, before their time, Are born into this idle world of rhyme; And the poor slattern muse is brought to bed, With all her imperfections on her head."

We subjoin a very good specimen of Hudson's songs, from his once very popular "Coronation of William and Adelaide" (1830), which, we think, will be allowed to fully justify our praise of the author:--

"And when we got to town, quite tired, The bells all rung, the guns they fired, The people looking all bemired, In one conglomeration. Soldiers red, policemen blue, Horse-guards, foot-guards, and blackguards too, Beef-eaters, dukes, and Lord knows who, To see the coronation.

While Dolly bridled up, so proud, At us the people laughed aloud; Dobbin stood in thickest crowd, Wi' quiet resignation. To move again he warn't inclined; 'Here's a chap!' says one behind, 'He's brought an old horse, lame and blind, To see the coronation.'

Dolly cried, 'Oh! dear, oh! dear, I wish I never had come here, To suffer every jibe and jeer, In such a situation.' While so busy, she and I To get a little ease did try, By goles! the king and queen went by, And all the coronation.

I struggled hard, and Dolly cried; And tho' to help myself I tried, We both were carried with the tide, Against our inclination. 'The reign's begun!' folks cried; ''tis true;' 'Sure,' said Dolly, 'I think so too; The rain's begun, for I'm wet thro', All through the coronation.'

We bade good-bye to Lunnun town; The king and queen they gain'd a crown; Dolly spoilt her bran-new gown, To her mortification. I'll drink our king and queen wi' glee, In home-brewed ale, and so will she; But Doll and I ne'er want to see Another coronation."

Our English bishops, who had not the same taste as the Cistercians in selecting pleasant places for their habitations, seem during the Middle Ages to have much affected the neighbourhood of Fleet Street. Ely Place still marks the residence of one rich prelate. In Chichester Rents we have already met with the humble successors of the netmaker of Galilee. In a siding on the north-west side of Shoe Lane the Bishops of Bangor lived, with their spluttering and choleric Welsh retinue, as early as 1378. Recent improvements have laid open the miserable "close" called Bangor Court, that once glowed with the reflections of scarlet hoods and jewelled copes; and a schoolhouse of bastard Tudor architecture, with sham turrets and flimsy mullioned windows, now occupies the site of the proud Christian prelate's palace. Bishop Dolben, who died in 1633 (Charles I.), was the last Welsh bishop who deigned to reside in a neighbourhood from which wealth and fashion was fast ebbing. Brayley says that a part of the old episcopal garden, where the ecclesiastical subjects of centuries had been discussed by shaven men and frocked scholars, still existed in 1759 (George II.); and, indeed, as Mr. Jesse records, even as late as 1828 (George IV.) a portion of the old mansion, once redolent with the stupefying incense of the semi-pagan Church, still lingered. Bangor House, according to Mr. J.T. Smith, is mentioned in the patent rolls as early as Edward III. The lawyers' barbarous dog-Latin of the old-deed describe, "unum messuag, unum placeam terræ, ac unam gardniam, cum aliis edificis," in Shoe Lane, London. In 1647 (Charles I.) Sir John Birkstead purchased of the Parliamentary trustees the bishop's lands, that had probably been confiscated, to build streets upon the site. But Sir John went on paving the old place, and never built at all. Cromwell's Act of 1657, to check the increase of London, entailed a special exemption in his favour. At the Restoration, the land returned to its Welsh bishop; but it had degenerated--the palace was divided into several residences, and mean buildings sprang up like fungi around it. A drawing of Malcolm's, early in the century, shows us its two Tudor windows. Latterly it became divided into wretched rooms, and two as three hundred poor people, chiefly Irish, herded in them. The house was entirely pulled down in the autumn of 1828.

Mr. Grant, that veteran of the press, tells a capital story, in his "History of the Newspaper Press," of one of the early vendors of unstamped newspapers in Shoe Lane:--

"Cleaves Police Gazette," says Mr. Grant, "consisted chiefly of reports of police cases. It certainly was a newspaper to all intents and purposes, and was ultimately so declared to be in a court of law by a jury. But in the meantime, while the action was pending, the police had instructions to arrest Mr. John Cleave, the proprietor, and seize all the copies of the paper as they came out of his office in Shoe Lane. He contrived for a time to elude their vigilance; and in order to prevent the seizure of his paper, he resorted to an expedient which was equally ingenious and laughable. Close by his little shop in Shoe Lane there was an undertaker, whose business, as might be inferred from the neighbourhood, as well as from his personal appearance and the homeliness of his shop, was exclusively among the lower and poorer classes of the community. With him Mr. Cleave made an arrangement to construct several coffins of the plainest and cheapest kind, for purposes which were fully explained. The 'undertaker,' whose ultra-republican principles were in perfect unison with those of Mr. Cleave, not only heartily undertook the work, but did so on terms so moderate that he would not ask for nor accept any profit. He, indeed, could imagine no higher nor holier duty than that of assisting in the dissemination of a paper which boldly and energetically preached the extinction of the aristocracy and the perfect equality in social position, and in property too, of all classes of the community. Accordingly the coffins, with a rudeness in make and material which were in perfect keeping with the purpose to which they were to be applied, were got ready; and Mr. Cleave, in the dead of night, got them filled with thousands of his Gazettes. It had been arranged beforehand that particular houses in various parts of the town should be in readiness to receive them with blinds down, as if some relative had been dead, and was about to be borne away to the house appointed for all living. The deal coffin was opened, and the contents were taken out, tied up in a parcel so as to conceal from the prying curiosity of any chance person that they were Cleave's Police Gazettes, and then sent off to the railway stations most convenient for their transmission to the provinces. The coffins after this were returned in the middle of next night to the 'undertaker's' in Shoe Lane, there to be in readiness to render a similar service to Mr. Cleave and the cause of red Republicanism when the next Gazette appeared."

"In this way Mr. Cleave contrived for some time to elude the vigilance of the police and to sell about 50,000 copies weekly of each impression of his paper. But the expedient, ingenious and eminently successful as it was for a time, failed at last. The people in Shoe Lane and the neighbourhood began to be surprised and alarmed at the number of funerals, as they believed them to be, which the departure of so many coffins from the 'undertaker's' necessarily implied. The very natural conclusion to which they came was, that this supposed sudden and extensive number of deaths could only be accounted for on the assumption that some fatal epidemic had visited the neighbourhood, and there made itself a local habitation. The parochial authorities, responding to the prevailing alarm, questioned the 'undertaker' friend and fellow-labourer of Mr. Cleave as to the causes of his sudden and extensive accession of business in the coffin-making way; and the result of the close questions put to him was the discovery of the whole affair. It need hardly be added that an immediate and complete collapse took place in Mr. Cleave's business, so far as his Police Gazette was concerned. Not another number of the publication ever made its appearance, while the coffin-trade of the 'undertaker' all at once returned to its normal proportions."

This stratagem of Cleave's was rivalled a few years ago by M. Herzen's clever plan of sending great numbers of his treasonable and forbidden paper, the Kolokol, to Russia, soldered up in sardine-boxes. No Government, in fact, can ever baffle determined and ingenious smugglers.

One especially sad association attaches to Shoe Lane, and that is the burial in the workhouse graveyard (the site of the late Farringdon Market) of that unhappy child of genius, Chatterton the poet. In August, 1770, the poor lad, who had come from Bristol full of hope and ambition to make his fortune in London by his pen, broken-hearted and maddened by disappointment, destroyed himself in his mean garret-lodging in Brooke Street, Holborn, by swallowing arsenic. Mr. John Dix, his very unscrupulous biographer, has noted down a curious legend about the possible removal of the poet's corpse from London to Bristol, which, doubtful as it is, is at least interesting as a possibility:--

"I found," says Mr. Dix, "that Mrs. Stockwell, of Peter Street, wife of Mr. Stockwell, a basket-maker, was the person who had communicated to Sir R. Wilmot her grounds for believing Chatterton to have been so interred; and on my requesting her to repeat to me what she knew of that affair, she commenced by informing me that at ten years of age she was a scholar of Mrs. Chatterton, his mother, where she was taught plain work, and remained with her until she was near twenty years of age; that she slept with her, and found her kind and motherly, insomuch that there were many things which in moments of affliction Mrs. C. communicated to her, that she would not have wished to have been generally known; and among others, she often repeated how happy she was that her unfortunate son lay buried in Redcliff, through the kind attention of a friend or relation in London, who, after the body had been cased in a parish shell, had it properly secured and sent to her by the waggon; that when it arrived it was opened, and the corpse found to be black and half putrid (having been burst with the motion of the carriage, or from some other cause), so that it became necessary to inter it speedily; and that it was early interred by Phillips, the sexton, who was of her family. That the effect of the loss of her son was a nervous disorder, which never quitted her, and she was often seen weeping at the bitter remembrance of her misfortune. She described the poet as having been sharp-tempered, but that it was soon over; and she often said he had cost her many uneasy hours, from the apprehension she entertained of his going mad, as he was accustomed to remain fixed for above an hour at a time quite motionless, and then he would snatch up a pen and write incessantly; but he was always, she added, affectionate....

"In addition to this, Mrs. Stockwell told the writer that the grave was on the right-hand side of the lime-tree, middle paved walk, in Redcliff Churchyard, about twenty feet from the father's grave, which is, she says, in the paved walk, and where now Mrs. Chatterton and Mrs. Newton, her daughter, also lie. Also, that Mrs. Chatterton gave a person leave to bury his child over her son's coffin, and was much vexed to find that he afterwards put the stone over it, which, when Chatterton was buried, had been taken up for the purpose of digging the grave, and set against the church-wall; that afterwards, when Mr. Hutchinson's or Mr. Taylor's wife died, they buried her also in the same grave, and put this stone over with a new inscription. (Query, did he erase the first, or turn the stone?--as this might lead to a discovery of the spot.)....

"Being referred to Mrs. Jane Phillips, of Rolls Alley, Rolls Lane, Great Gardens, Temple Parish (who is sister to that Richard Phillips who was sexton at Redcliff Church in the year 1772), she informed me that his widow and a daughter were living in Cathay; the widow is sexton, a Mr. Perrin, of Colston's Parade, acting for her. She remembers Chatterton having been at his father's school, and that he always called Richard Phillips, her brother, 'uncle,' and was much liked by him. He liked him for his spirit, and there can be no doubt he would have risked the privately burying him on that account. When she heard he was gone to London she was sorry to hear it, for all loved him, and thought he could get no good there.

"Soon after his death her brother, R. Phillips, told her that poor Chatterton had killed himself; on which she said she would go to Madame Chatterton's, to know the rights of it; but that he forbade her, and said, if she did so he should be sorry he had told her. She, however, did go, and asking if it was true that he was dead, Mrs. Chatterton began to weep bitterly, saying, 'My son indeed is dead!' and when she asked her where he was buried, she replied, 'Ask me nothing; he is dead and buried.'"

Poppin's Court (No. 109) marks the site of the ancient hostel (hotel) of the Abbots of Cirencester--though what they did there, when they ought to have been on their knees in their own far-away Gloucestershire abbey, history does not choose to record. The sign of their inn was the "Poppingaye" (popinjay, parrot), and in 1602 (last year of Elizabeth) the alley was called Poppingay Alley. That excellent man Van Mildert (then a poor curate, living in Ely Place, afterwards Bishop of Durham--a prelate remarkable for this above all his many other Christian virtues, that he was not proud) was once driven into this alley with a young barrister friend by a noisy illumination-night crowd. The street boys began firing a volley of squibs at the young curate, who found all hope of escape barred, and dreaded the pickpockets, who take rapid advantage of such temporary embarrassments; but his good-natured exclamation, "Ah! here you are, popping away in Poppin's Court!" so pleased the crowd that they at once laughingly opened a passage for him. "Sic me servavit, Apollo," he used afterwards to add when telling the story.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] "This Scott lived in Pudding Lane, and had some time been a page (or such-like) to the Lord Norris."

[5] "Davy Ramsay brought a half-quartern sack to put the treasure in."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XII. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES SOUTH

Worthy Mr. Fisher--Lamb's Wednesday Evenings--Persons one would wish to have seen--Ram Alley--Serjeants' Inn--The Daily News--"Memory" Woodfall--A Mug-House Riot--Richardson's Printing Office--Fielding and Richardson--Johnson's Estimate of Richardson--Hogarth and Richardson's Guest--An Egotist Rebuked--The King's "Housewife"--Caleb Colton: his Life, Works, and Sentiments.

Falcon Court, Fleet Street, took its name from an inn which bore the sign of the "Falcon." This passage formerly belonged to a gentleman named Fisher, who, out of gratitude to the Cordwainers' Company, bequeathed it to them by will. His gratitude is commonly said to have arisen from the number of good dinners that the Company had given him. However this may be, the Cordwainers are the present owners of the estate, and are under the obligation of having a sermon preached annually at the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan, on the 10th of July, when certain sums are given to the poor. Formerly it was the custom to drink sack in the church to the pious memory of Mr. Fisher, but this appears to have been discontinued for a considerable period. This Fisher was a jolly fellow, if all the tales are true which are related of him, as, besides the sack drinking, he stipulated that the Cordwainers should give a grand feast on the same day yearly to all their tenants. What a quaint picture might be made of the churchwardens in the old church drinking to the memory of Mr. Fisher! Wynkyn de Worde, the father of printing in England, lived in Fleet Street, at his messuage or inn known by the sign of the Falcon. Whether it was the inn that stood on the site of Falcon Court is not known with certainty, but most probably it was.

Charles Lamb came to 16, Mitre Court Buildings in 1800, after leaving Southampton Buildings, and remained in that quiet harbour out of Fleet Street till 1809, when he removed to Inner Temple Lane.

It was whilst Lamb was residing in Mitre Court Buildings that those Wednesday evenings of his were in their glory. In two of Mr. Hazlitt's papers are graphic pictures of these delightful Wednesdays and the Wednesday men, and admirable notes of several choice conversations. There is a curious sketch in one of a little tilt between Coleridge and Holcroft, which must not be omitted. "Coleridge was riding the high German horse, and demonstrating the 'Categories of the Transcendental Philosophy' to the author of The Road to Ruin, who insisted on his knowledge of German and German metaphysics, having read the 'Critique of Pure Reason' in the original. 'My dear Mr. Holcroft,' said Coleridge, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, 'you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl of about fifteen, in the Hartz Forest, in Germany, and who one day, as I was reading "The Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable," the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, "What! you read Kant? Why, I, that am a German born, don't understand him!"' This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out, in no measured tone, 'Mr. Coleridge, you are the most eloquent man I ever met with, and the most troublesome with your eloquence.' Phillips held the cribbage-peg, that was to mark him game, suspended in his hand, and the whist-table was silent for a moment. I saw Holcroft downstairs, and on coming to the landing-place in Mitre Court he stopped me to observe that he thought Mr. Coleridge a very clever man, with a great command of language, but that he feared he did not always affix very proper ideas to the words he used. After he was gone we had our laugh out, and went on with the argument on 'The Nature of Reason, the Imagination, and the Will.' ... It would make a supplement to the 'Biographia Literaria,' in a volume and a half, octavo."

It was at one of these Wednesdays that Lamb started his famous question as to persons "one would wish to have seen." It was a suggestive topic, and proved a fruitful one. Mr. Hazlitt, who was there, has left an account behind him of the kind of talk which arose out of this hint, so lightly thrown out by the author of "Elia," and it is worth giving in his own words:--

"On the question being started, Ayrton said, 'I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Locke?' In this Ayrton, as usual, reckoned without his host. Everyone burst out a laughing at the expression of Lamb's face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. 'Y--yes, the greatest names,' he stammered out hastily; 'but they were not persons--not persons.' 'Not persons?' said Ayrton, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. 'That is,' rejoined Lamb, 'not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton you mean the "Essay on the Human Understanding" and "Principia," which we have to this day. Beyond their contents, there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see anyone bodily for is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller's portraits of them; but who could paint Shakespeare?' 'Ay,' retorted Ayrton, 'there it is. Then I suppose you would prefer seeing him and Milton instead?' 'No,' said Lamb, 'neither; I have seen so much of Shakespeare on the stage.' ... 'I shall guess no more,' said Ayrton. 'Who is it, then, you would like to see "in his habit as he lived," if you had your choice of the whole range of English literature?' Lamb then named Sir Thomas Brown and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sydney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their night-gowns and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with them. At this Ayrton laughed outright, and conceived Lamb was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example he thought there might be something in it, and waited for an explanation in a state of whimsical suspense....

"When Lamb had given his explanation, some one inquired of him if he could not see from the window the Temple walk in which Chaucer used to take his exercise, and on his name being put to the vote I was pleased to find there was a general sensation in his favour in all but Ayrton, who said something about the ruggedness of the metre, and even objected to the quaintness of the orthography....

"Captain Burney muttered something about Columbus, and Martin Burney hinted at the Wandering Jew; but the last was set aside as spurious, and the first made over to the New World.

"'I should like,' said Mr. Reynolds, 'to have seen Pope talking with Patty Blount, and I have seen Goldsmith.' Everyone turned round to look at Mr. Reynolds, as if by so doing they too could get a sight of Goldsmith....

"Erasmus Phillips, who was deep in a game of piquet at the other end of the room, whispered to Martin Burney to ask if Junius would not be a fit person to invoke from the dead. 'Yes,' said Lamb, 'provided he would agree to lay aside his mask.'

"We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding was mentioned as a candidate. Only one, however, seconded the proposition. 'Richardson?' 'By all means; but only to look at him through the glass-door of his back-shop, hard at work upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary contrast that ever was presented between an author and his works), but not to let him come behind his counter, lest he should want you to turn customer; nor to go upstairs with him, lest he should offer to read the first manuscript of "Sir Charles Grandison," which was originally written in twenty-eight volumes octavo; or get out the letters of his female correspondents to prove that "Joseph Andrews" was low.'

"There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any one expressed the least desire to see--Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face and wily policy--and one enthusiast, John Bunyan, the immortal author of 'The Pilgrim's Progress.'....

"Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received with the greatest enthusiasm. He presently superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on condition that he should sit in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the farce,--Lear and Wildair, and Abel Drugger....

"Lamb inquired if there was any one that was hanged that I would choose to mention, and I answered, 'Eugene Aram.'"

The present Hare Place was the once disreputable Ram Alley, the scene of a comedy of that name, written by Lodowick Barry and dramatised in the reign of James I.; the plot Killigrew afterwards used in his vulgar Parson's Wedding. Barry, an Irishman, of whom nothing much is known, makes one of his roystering characters say,--

"And rough Ram Alley stinks with cooks' shops vile; Yet, stay, there's many a worthy lawyer's chamber 'Buts upon Ram Alley."

As a precinct of Whitefriars, Ram Alley enjoyed the mischievous privilege of sanctuary for murderers, thieves, and debtors--indeed, any class of rascals except traitors--till the fifteenth century. After this it sheltered only debtors. Barry speaks of its cooks, salesmen, and laundresses; and Shadwell classes it (Charles II.) with Pye Corner, as the resort of "rascally stuff." Lord Clarendon, in his autobiography, describes the Great Fire as burning on the Thames side as far as the "new buildings of the Inner Temple next to Whitefriars," striking next on some of the buildings which joined to Ram Alley, and sweeping all those into Fleet Street. In the reign of George I. Ram Alley was full of public-houses, and was a place of no reputation, having passages into the Temple and Serjeants' Inn. "A kind of privileged place for debtors," adds Hatton, "before the late Act of Parliament (9 & 10 William III. c. 17, s. 15) for taking them away." This useful Act swept out all the London sanctuaries, those vicious relics of monastic rights, including Mitre Court, Salisbury Court (Fleet Street), the Savoy, Fulwood Rents (Holborn), Baldwin's Gardens (Gray's Inn Lane), the Minories, Deadman's Place, Montague Close (Southwark), the Clink, and the Mint in the same locality. The Savoy and the Mint, however, remained disreputable a generation or two later.

Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street, now deserted by the faithless Serjeants, is supposed to have been given to the Dean and Chapter of York in 1409 (Henry IV.) It then consisted of shops, &c. In 1627 (Charles I.) the inn began its legal career by being leased for forty years to nine judges and fifteen serjeants. In this hall, in 1629, the judges in full bench struck a sturdy blow at feudal privileges by agreeing that peers might be attached upon process for contempt out of Chancery. In 1723 (George I.) the inn was highly aristocratic, its inmates being the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Baron, justices, and Serjeants. In 1730, however, the fickle serjeants removed to Chancery Lane, and Adam, the architect of the Adelphi, designed the present nineteen houses and the present street frontage. On the site of the hall arose the Amicable Assurance Society, which in 1865 transferred its business to the Economic, and the house is now the Norwich Union Office. The inn is a parish in itself, making its own assessment, and contributing to the City rates. Its pavement, which had been part of the stone-work of Old St. Paul's, was not replaced till 1860. The conservative old inn retained its old oil lamps long after the introduction of gas.

The arms of Serjeants' Inn, worked into the iron gate opening on Fleet Street, are a dove and a serpent, the serpent twisted into a kind of true lover's knot. The lawyers of Serjeants' Inn, no doubt, unite the wisdom of the serpent with the guilelessness of the dove. Singularly enough Dr. Dodd, the popular preacher, who was hanged, bore arms nearly similar.

Half way down Bouverie Street, in the centre of old Whitefriars, is the office of the Daily News. The first number of this popular and influential paper appeared on January 21, 1846. The publishers, and part proprietors, were Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, the printers; the editor was Charles Dickens; the manager was Dickens's father, Mr. John Dickens; the second, or assistant, editor, Douglas Jerrold; and among the other "leader" writers were Albany Fonblanque and John Forster, both of the Examiner. "Father Prout" (Mahoney) acted as Roman correspondent. The musical critic was the late Mr. George Hogarth, Dickens's father-in-law; and the new journal had an "Irish Famine Commissioner" in the person of Mr. R.H. Horne, the poet. Miss Martineau wrote leading articles in the new paper for several years, and Mr. M'Cullagh Torrens was also a recognised contributor. The staff of Parliamentary reporters was said to be the best in London, several having been taken, at an advanced salary, off the Times.

"The speculative proprietorship," says Mr. Grant, in his "History of the Newspaper Press," "was divided into one hundred shares, some of which were held by Sir William Jackson, M.P., Sir Joshua Watkins, and the late Sir Joseph Paxton. Mr. Charles Dickens, as editor, received a salary of £2,000 a year."

The early numbers of the paper contained instalments of Dickens's "Pictures from Italy;" yet the new venture did not succeed. Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold took the night-work on alternate days; but Dickens, who never made politics a special study, very soon retired from the editorship altogether, and Jerrold was chief editor for a little while till he left to set up his Weekly Newspaper. Mr. Forster also had the editorship for a short period, and the paper then fell into the hands of the late Mr. Dilke, of the Athenæum, who excited some curiosity by extensively advertising these words: "See the Daily News of June 1st." The Daily News of June 1, 1846 (which began No. 1 again), was a paper of four pages, issued at 2-1/2_d._, which, deducting the stamp, at that time affixed to every copy of every newspaper, was in effect three halfpence. One of the features of the new plan was that the sheet should vary in size, according to the requirements of the day--with an eye, nevertheless, at all times to selection and condensation. It was a bold attempt, carried out with great intelligence and spirit; but it was soon found necessary to put on another halfpenny, and in a year or two the Daily News was obliged to return to the usual price of "dailies" at that time--fivepence. The chief editors of the paper, besides those already mentioned, have been Mr. Eyre Evans Crowe, Mr. Frederick Knight Hunt, Mr. Weir, and Mr. Thomas Walker, who retired in January, 1870, on receiving the editorship of the London Gazette. The journal came down to a penny in June, 1868.

The Daily News, at the beginning, inspired the Times with some dread of rivalry; and it is noteworthy that, for several years afterwards, the great journal was very unfriendly in its criticisms on Dickens's books.

There is no doubt that, over sanguine of success, the Daily News proprietors began by sinking too much money in the foundations. In 1846, the Times' reporters received on an average only five guineas a week, while the Daily News gave seven; but the pay was soon of necessity reduced. Mr. Grant computes the losses of the Daily News for the first ten years at not much less than £200,000. The talent and enterprise of this paper, during the recent (1870) German invasion of France, and the excellence of their correspondents in either camp, is said to have trebled its circulation, which Mr. Grant computes at a daily issue of 90,000. As an organ of the highest and most enlightened form of Liberalism and progress, the Daily News now stands pre-eminent.

Many actors, poets, and authors dwelt in Salisbury Court in Charles II.'s time, and the great Betterton, Underhill, and Sandford affected this neighbourhood, to be near the theatres. Lady Davenant here presided over the Dorset Gardens Company; Shadwell, "round as a butt and liquored every chink," nightly reeled home to the same precinct, unsteadily following the guidance of a will-o'-the-wisp link-boy; and in the square lived and died Sir John King, the Duke of York's solicitor-general.

If Salisbury Square boasts of Richardson, the respectable citizen and admirable novelist, it must also plead guilty to having been the residence of that not very reputable personage, Mr. John Eyre, who, although worth, as it was said, some £20,000, was transported on November 1, 1771 (George III.) for systematic pilfering of paper from the alderman's chamber, in the justice room, Guildhall. This man, led away by the thirst for money, had an uncle who made two wills, one leaving Eyre all his money, except a legacy of £500 to a clergyman; another leaving the bulk to the clergyman, and £500 only to his nephew. Eyre, not knowing of the second will, destroyed the first, in order to cancel the vexatious bequest. When the real will was produced his disappointment and selfish remorse must have produced an expression of repressed rage worthy of Hogarth's pencil.

In Salisbury Square Mr. Clarke's disagreeable confessions about the Duke of York were publicly burned, on the very spot (says Mr. Noble) where the zealous radical demagogue, Waithman, subsequently addressed the people from a temporary platform, not being able to obtain the use of St. Bride's Vestry. Nor must we forget to chronicle No. 53 as the house of Tatum, a silversmith, to whom, in 1812, that eminent man John Faraday acted as humble friend and assistant. How often does young genius act the herdsman, as Apollo did when he tended the kine of Admetus!

The Woodfalls, too, in their time, lent celebrity to Salisbury Square. The first Woodfall who became eminent was Henry Woodfall, at the "Elzevir's Head" at Temple Bar. He commenced business under the auspices of Pope. His son Henry, who rose to be a Common Councilman and Master of the Stationers' Company, bought of Theophilus Cibber, in 1736-37, one-third of a tenth share of the London Daily Post, an organ which gradually grew into the Public Advertiser, that daring paper in which the celebrated letters of Junius first appeared. Those letters, scathing and full of Greek fire, brought down Lords and Commons, King's Bench and Old Bailey, on Woodfall, and he was fined and imprisoned. Whether Burke, Barré, Chatham, Horne Tooke, or Sir Philip Francis wrote them, will now probably never be known. The stern writer in the iron mask went down into the grave shrouded in his own mystery, and that grave no inquisitive eyes will ever find. "I am the sole depository of my secret," he wrote, "and it shall perish with me." The Junius Woodfall died in 1805. William Woodfall, the younger brother, was born in 1745, and educated at St. Paul's School. He was editor and printer of the Morning Chronicle, and in 1790 had his office in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square (Noble). "Memory" Woodfall, as William was generally called, acquired fame by his extraordinary power of reporting from memory the speeches he heard in the House of Commons. His practice during a debate (says his friend Mr. Taylor, of the Sun) was to close his eyes and lean with both hands upon his stick. He was so well acquainted with the tone and manner of the several speakers that he seldom changed his attitude but to catch the name of a new member. His memory was as accurate as it was capacious, and, what was almost miraculous, he could retain full recollection of any particular debate for a full fortnight, and after many long nights of speaking. Woodfall used to say he could put a speech away on a corner shelf of his mind for future reference. This is an instance of power of memory scarcely equalled by Fuller, who, it is said, could repeat the names of all the shops down the Strand (at a time every shop had a sign) in regular and correct sequence; and it even surpasses "Memory" Thompson, who used to boast he could remember every shop from Ludgate Hill to the end of Piccadilly. Yet, with all his sensitively retentive memory, Woodfall did not care for slight interruptions during his writing. Dr. Johnson used to write abridged reports of debates for the Gentleman's Magazine from memory, but, then, reports at that time were short and trivial. Woodfall was also a most excellent dramatic critic--slow to censure, yet never sparing just rebuke. At the theatre his extreme attention gave his countenance a look of gloom and severity. Mr. J. Taylor, of the Sun, describes Kemble as watching Woodfall in one of those serious moods, and saying to a friend, "How applicable to that man is the passage in Hamlet,--'thoughts black, hands apt.'"

Finding himself hampered on the Morning Chronicle, Woodfall started a new daily paper, with the title of the Diary, but eventually he was overpowered by his competitors and their large staff of reporters. His eldest son, who displayed great abilities, went mad. Mr. Woodfall's hospitable parties at his house at Kentish Town are sketched for us by Mr. J. Taylor. On one particular occasion he mentions meeting Mr. Tickel, Richardson (a partner in "The Rolliad"), John Kemble, Perry (of the Chronicle), Dr. Glover (a humorist of the day), and John Coust. Kemble and Perry fell out over their wine, and Perry was rude to the stately tragedian. Kemble, eyeing him with the scorn of Coriolanus, exclaimed, in the words of Zanga,--

"A lion preys not upon carcases."

Perry very naturally effervesced at this, and war would have been instantly proclaimed between the belligerents had not Coust and Richardson promptly interposed. The warlike powers were carefully sent home in separate vehicles.

Mr. Woodfall had a high sense of the importance of a Parliamentary reporter's duties, and once, during a heavy week, when his eldest son came to town to assist him, he said, "And Charles Fox to have a debate on a Saturday! What! does he think that reporters are made of iron?" Woodfall used to tell a characteristic story of Dr. Dodd. When that miserable man was in Newgate waiting sentence of death he sent earnestly for the editor of the Morning Chronicle. Woodfall, a kind and unselfish man, instantly hurried off, expecting that Dodd wished his serious advice. In the midst of Woodfall's condolement he was stopped by the Doctor, who said he had wished to see him on quite a different subject. Knowing Woodfall's judgment in dramatic matters, he was anxious to have his opinion on a comedy which he had written, and to request his interest with a manager to bring it on the stage. Woodfall was the more surprised and shocked as on entering Newgate he had been informed by Ackerman, the keeper of Newgate, that the order for Dr. Dodd's execution had just arrived.

Before parting with the Woodfall family, we may mention that it is quite certain that Henry Sampson Woodfall did not know who the author of "Junius" was. Long after the letters appeared he used to say,--"I hope and trust Junius is not dead, as I think he would have left me a legacy; for though I derived much honour from his preference, I suffered much by the freedom of his pen."

The grandson of William, Henry Dick Woodfall, died in Nice, April 13, 1869, aged sixty-nine, carrying to the grave (says Mr. Noble) the last chance of discovering one of the best kept secrets ever known.

The Whig "mug-house" of Salisbury Court deserves notice. The death of Queen Anne (1714) roused the hopes of the Jacobites. The rebellion of 1715 proved how bitterly they felt the peaceful accession of the Elector of Hanover. The northern revolt convinced them of their strength, but its failure taught them no lesson. They attributed its want of success to the rashness of the leaders and the absence of unanimity in their followers, to the outbreak not being simultaneous; to every cause, indeed, but the right one. It was about this time that the Whig gentlemen of London, to unite their party and to organise places of gathering, established "mug-houses" in various parts of the City. At these places, "free-and-easy" clubs were held, where Whig citizens could take their mug of ale, drink loyal toasts, sing loyal songs, and arrange party processions. These assemblies, not always very just or forbearing, soon led to violent retaliations on the part of the Tories, attacks were made on several of the mug-houses, and dangerous riots naturally ensued. From the papers of the time we learn that the Tories wore white roses, or rue, thyme, and rosemary in their hats, flourished oak branches and green ribbons, and shouted "High Church;" "Ormond for ever;" "No King George;" "Down with the Presbyterians;" "Down with the mug-houses." The Whigs, on the other side, roared "King George for ever," displayed orange cockades, with the motto,--

"With heart and hand By George we'll stand,"

and did their best on royal birthdays and other thanksgivings, by illuminations and blazing bonfires outside the mug-house doors, to irritate their adversaries and drive them to acts of illegal violence. The chief Whig mug-houses were in Long Acre, Cheapside, St. John's Lane (Clerkenwell), Tower Street, and Salisbury Court.

Mackey, a traveller, who wrote "A Journey through England" about this time, describes the mug-houses very lucidly:--

"The most amusing and diverting of all," he says, "is the 'Mug-House Club,' in Long Acre, where every Wednesday and Saturday a mixture of gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen meet in a great room, and are seldom under a hundred. They have a grave old gentleman in his own grey hairs, now within a few months of ninety years old, who is their president, and sits in an armed-chair some steps higher than the rest of the company, to keep the whole room in order. A harp always plays all the time at the lower end of the room, and every now and then one or other of the company rises and entertains the rest with a song; and, by-the-by, some are good masters. Here is nothing drank but ale; and every gentleman hath his separate mug, which he chalks on the table where he sits as it is brought in, and everyone retires when he pleases, as in a coffee-house. The room is always so diverted with songs, and drinking from one table to another to one another's healths, that there is no room for politics, or anything that can sour conversation. One must be up by seven to get room, and after ten the company are, for the most part, gone. This is a winter's amusement that is agreeable enough to a stranger for once or twice, and he is well diverted with the different humours when the mugs overflow."

An attack on a Whig mug-house, the "Roebuck," in Cheapside, June, 1716, was followed by a still more stormy assault on the Salisbury Court mug-house in July of the same year. The riot began on a Friday, but the Whigs kept a resolute face, and the mob dwindled away. On the Monday they renewed the attack, declaring that the Whigs were drinking "Down with the Church," and reviling the memory of Queen Anne; and they swore they would level the house and make a bonfire of the timber in the middle of Fleet Street. But the wily Whigs, barricading the door, slipped out a messenger at a back door, and sent to a mug-house in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, for reinforcements. Presently a band of Whig bludgeon-men arrived, and the Whigs of Salisbury Court then snatched up pokers, tongs, pitchforks, and legs of stools, and sallied out on the Tory mob, who soon fled before them. For two days the Tory mob seethed, fretted, and swore revenge. But the report of a squadron of horse being drawn up at Whitehall ready to ride down on the City kept them gloomily quiet. On the third day a Jacobite, named Vaughan, formerly a Bridewell boy, led them on to revenge; and on Tuesday they stormed the place in earnest. "The best of the Tory mob," says a Whig paper of the day, "were High Church scaramouches, chimney-sweeps, hackney coachmen, foot-boys, tinkers, shoe-blacks, street idlers, ballad singers, and strumpets." The contemporaneous account will most vividly describe the scene.

The Weekly Journal (a Whig paper) of July 28, 1716, says: "The Papists and Jacobites, in pursuance of their rebellious designs, assembled a mob on Friday night last, and threatened to attack Mr. Read's mug-house in Salisbury Court, in Fleet Street; but, seeing the loyal gentlemen that were there were resolved to defend themselves, the cowardly Papists and Jacobites desisted for that time. But on Monday night the villains meeting together again in a most rebellious manner, they began first to attack Mr. Goslin's house, at the sign of the 'Blew Boar's Head,' near Water Lane, in Fleet Street, breaking the windows thereof, for no other reason but because he is well-affected to his Majesty King George and the present Government. Afterwards they went to the above-said mug-house in Salisbury Court; but the cowardly Jacks not being able to accomplish their hellish designs that night, they assembled next day in great numbers from all parts of the town, breaking the windows with brick-bats, broke open the cellar, got into the lower rooms, which they robb'd, and pull'd down the sign, which was carried in triumph before the mob by one Thomas Bean, servant to Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Cassey, two rebels under sentence of death, and for which he is committed to Newgate, as well as several others, particularly one Hook, a joyner, in Blackfriars, who is charged with acting a part in gutting the mug-house. Some of the rioters were desperately wounded, and one Vaughan, a seditious weaver, formerly an apprentice in Bridewell, and since employed there, who was a notorious ringleader of mobs, was kill'd at the aforesaid mug-house. Many notorious Papists were seen to abet and assist in this villanous rabble, as were others, who call themselves Churchmen, and are like to meet with a suitable reward in due time for their assaulting gentlemen who meet at these mug-houses only to drink prosperity to the Church of England as by law established, the King's health, the Prince of Wales's, and the rest of the Royal Family, and those of his faithful and loyal Ministers. But it is farther to be observed that women of mean, scandalous lives, do frequently point, hiss, and cry out 'Whigs' upon his Majesty's good and loyal subjects, by which, raising a mob, they are often insulted by them. But 'tis hoped the magistrates will take such methods which may prevent the like insults for the future.

"Thursday last the coroner's inquest sat on the body of the person killed in Salisbury Court, who were for bringing in their verdict, wilful murder against Mr. Read, the man of the mug-house; but some of the jury stick out, and will not agree with that verdict; so that the matter is deferr'd till Monday next."

"On Tuesday last," says the same paper (August 4, 1716), "a petition, signed by some of the inhabitants of Salisbury Court, was deliver'd to the Court of Aldermen, setting forth some late riots occasioned by the meeting of some persons at the mug-house there. The petition was referr'd to, and a hearing appointed the same day before the Lord Mayor. The witnesses on the side of the petition were a butcher woman, a barber's 'prentice, and two or three other inferior people. These swore, in substance--that the day the man was killed there, they saw a great many people gathered together about the mug-house, throwing stones and dirt, &c.; that about twelve o'clock they saw Mr. Read come out with a gun, and shoot a man who was before the mob at some distance, and had no stick in his hand. Those who were call'd in Mr. Read's behalf depos'd that a very great mob attacked the house, crying, 'High Church and Ormond; No Hanover; No King George;' that then the constable read the Proclamation, charging them to disperse, but they still continued to cry, 'Down with the mug-house;' that two soldiers then issued out of the house, and drove the mob into Fleet Street; but by throwing sticks and stones, they drove these two back to the house, and the person shot returned at the head of the mob with a stick in his hand flourishing, and crying, 'No Hanover; No King George;' and 'Down with the mug-house.' That then Mr. Read desired them to disperse, or he would shoot amongst them, and the deceased making at him, he shot him and retired indoors; that then the mob forced into the house, rifled all below stairs, took the money out of the till, let the beer about the cellar, and what goods they could not carry away, they brought into the streets and broke to pieces; that they would have forced their way up stairs and murdered all in the house, but that a person who lodged in the house made a barricade at the stair-head, where he defended himself above half an hour against all the mob, wounded some of them, and compelled them to give over the assault. There were several very credible witnesses to these circumstances, and many more were ready to have confirmed it, but the Lord Mayor thought sufficient had been said, and the following gentlemen, who are men of undoubted reputation and worth, offering to be bail for Mr. Read, namely, Mr. Johnson, a justice of the peace, and Colonels Coote and Westall, they were accepted, and accordingly entered into a recognisance."

Five of the rioters were eventually hung at Tyburn Turnpike, in the presence of a vast crowd. According to Mr. J.T. Smith, in his "Streets of London," a Whig mug-house existed as early as 1694. It has been said the slang word "mug" owes its derivation to Lord Shaftesbury's "ugly mug," which the beer cups were moulded to resemble.

In the Flying Post of June 30, 1716, we find a doggerel old mug-house ballad, which is so characteristic of the violence of the times that it is worth preserving:--

"Since the Tories could not fight, And their master took his flight, They labour to keep up their faction; With a bough and a stick, And a stone and a brick, They equip their roaring crew for action.

"Thus in battle array At the close of the day, After wisely debating their deep plot, Upon windows and stall, They courageously fall, And boast a great victory they have got.

"But, alas! silly boys, For all the mighty noise, Of their 'High Church and Ormond for ever,' A brave Whig with one hand, At George's command, Can make their mightiest hero to quiver."

Richardson's printing office was at the north-west corner of Salisbury Square, communicating with the court, No. 76, Fleet Street. Here the thoughtful old citizen wrote "Pamela," and here, in 1756, Oliver Goldsmith acted as his "reader." Richardson seems to have been an amiable and benevolent man, kind to his compositors and servants and beloved by children. All the anecdotes relating to his private life are pleasant. He used to encourage early rising among his workmen by hiding half crowns among the disordered type, so that the earliest comer might find his virtue rewarded; and he would frequently bring up fruit from the country to give to those of his servants who had been zealous and good-tempered.

Samuel Richardson, the author of "Pamela" and "Clarissa," was the son of a Derbyshire joiner. He was born in 1689, and died in 1761. Apprenticed to a London printer, he rose by steady industry and prudence to be the manager of a large business, printer of the Journals of the House of Commons, Master of the Stationers' Company, and part-printer to the king. In 1741, at the age of fifty-two, publishers urging the thriving citizen to write them a book of moral letters, Richardson produced "Pamela," a novel which ran through five editions the first year, and became the rage of the town. Ladies carried the precious volumes to Ranelagh, and held them up in smiling triumph to each other. Pope praised the novel as more useful than twenty volumes of sermons, and Dr. Sherlock gravely recommended it from the pulpit. In 1749 Richardson wrote "Clarissa Harlowe," his most perfect work, and in 1753 his somewhat tedious "Sir Charles Grandison" (7 vols.). In "Pamela" he drew a servant, whom her master attempts to seduce and eventually marries, but in "Clarissa" the heroine, after harrowing misfortunes, dies unrewarded. Richardson had always a moral end in view. He hated vice and honoured virtue, but he is too often prolix and wearisome. He wished to write novels that should wean the young from the foolish romances of his day. In "Pamela" he rewarded struggling virtue; in "Clarissa" he painted the cruel selfishness of vice; in "Sir Charles" he tried to represent the perfect Christian gentleman. Coleridge said that to read Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a sick room, heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy May morning. Richardson, indeed, wrote more for women than men. Fielding was coarser, but more manly; he had humour, but no moral purpose at all. The natural result was that Fielding and his set looked on Richardson as a grave, dull, respectable old prig; Richardson on Fielding as a low rake, who wrote like a man who had been an ostler born in a stable, or a runner in a sponging-house. "The virtues of Fielding's heroes," the vain old printer used to say to his feminine clique, "are the vices of a truly good man."

Dr. Johnson, who had been befriended by Richardson, was never tired of depreciating Fielding and crying up the author of "Pamela." "Sir," he used to thunder out, "there is as much difference between the two as between a man who knows how a watch is made and a man who can merely tell the hour on the dial-plate." He called Fielding a "barren rascal." "Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all 'Tom Jones.'" Some one present here mildly suggested that Richardson was very tedious. "Why, sir," replied Johnson, "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so great that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." After all, it must be considered that, old-fashioned as Richardson's novels have now become, the old printer dissected the human heart with profound knowledge and exquisite care, and that in the back shop in Salisbury Court, amid the jar of printing-presses, the quiet old citizen drew his ideal beings with far subtler lines and touches than any previous novelist had done.

On one occasion at least Hogarth and Johnson met at Richardson's house.

"Mr. Hogarth," says Nichols, "came one day to see Richardson, soon after the execution of Dr. Cameron, for having taken arms for the house of Stuart in 1745-46; and, being a warm partisan of George II., he observed to Richardson that certainly there must have been some very unfavourable circumstances lately discovered in this particular case which had induced the king to approve of an execution for rebellion so long after the time it was committed, as this had the appearance of putting a man to death in cold blood, and was very unlike his majesty's usual clemency. While he was talking he perceived a person standing at a window in the room shaking his head and rolling himself about in a ridiculous manner. He concluded he was an idiot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forward to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and all at once took up the argument, and burst out into an invective against George II., as one who, upon all occasions, was unrelenting and barbarous; mentioning many instances, particularly that, where an officer of high rank had been acquitted by a court martial, George II. had, with his own hand, struck his name off the list. In short, he displayed such a power of eloquence that Hogarth looked at him in astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the moment inspired. Neither Johnson nor Hogarth were made known to each other at this interview."

Boswell tells a good story of a rebuke that Richardson's amiable but inordinate egotism on one occasion received, much to Johnson's secret delight, which is certainly worth quoting before we dismiss the old printer altogether. "One day," says Boswell, "at his country house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, wishing to please Richardson, mentioned to him a flattering circumstance, that he had seen his 'Clarissa' lying on the king's brother's table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it; but by and bye, when, there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman: 'I think, sir, you were saying somewhat about'--pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman provoked at his inordinate vanity resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, 'A mere trifle, sir; not worth repeating.' The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much."

At one corner of Salisbury Square (says Mr. Timbs) are the premises of Peacock, Bampton, & Mansfield, the famous pocket-book makers, whose "Polite Repository" for 1778 is "the patriarch of all pocket-books." Its picturesque engravings have never been surpassed, and their morocco and russia bindings scarcely equalled. In our time Queen Adelaide and her several maids of honour used the "Repository." George IV. was provided by the firm with a ten-guinea housewife (an antique-looking pocket-book, with gold-mounted scissors, tweezers, &c.); and Mr. Mansfield relates that on one occasion the king took his housewife from his pocket and handed it round the table to his guests, and next day the firm received orders for twenty-five, "just like the king's."

In St. Bride's Passage, westward (says Mr. Timbs), was a large dining-house, where, some forty years ago, Colton, the author, used to dine, and publicly boast that he wrote the whole of his "Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words," upon a small rickety deal table, with one pen. Another frequenter of this place was one Webb, who seems to have been so well up in the topics of the day that he was a sort of walking newspaper, who was much with the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands when they visited England in 1825.

This Caleb Colton, mentioned by Mr. Timbs, was that most degraded being, a disreputable clergyman, with all the vices but little of the genius of Churchill, and had been, in his flourishing time, vicar of Kew and Petersham. He was educated at Eton, and eventually became Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He wrote "A Plain and Authentic Narrative of the Stamford Ghost," "Remarks on the Tendencies of 'Don Juan,'" a poem on Napoleon, and a satire entitled "Hypocrisy." His best known work, however, was "Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words," published in 1820. These aphorisms want the terse brevity of Rochefoucauld, and are in many instances vapid and trivial. A passion for gaming at last swallowed up Colton's other vices, and becoming involved, he cut the Gordian knot of debt in 1828 by absconding; his living was then seized and given to another. He fled to America, and from there returned to that syren city, Paris, where he is said in two years to have won no less than £25,000. The miserable man died by his own hand at Fontainebleau, in 1832. In the "Lacon" is the subjoined passage, that seems almost prophetic of the miserable author's miserable fate:--

"The gamester, if he die a martyr to his profession, is doubly ruined. He adds his soul to every loss, and by the act of suicide renounces earth to forfeit heaven.".... "Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide, anguish of body none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receive."

And here is a fine sentiment, worthy of Dr. Dodd himself:--

"There is but one pursuit in life which it is in the power of all to follow and of all to attain. It is subject to no disappointments, since he that perseveres makes every difficulty an advancement and every contest a victory--and this the pursuit of virtue. Sincerely to aspire after virtue is to gain her, and zealously to labour after her wages is to receive them. Those that seek her early will find her before it is late; her reward also is with her, and she will come quickly. For the breast of a good man is a little heaven commencing on earth, where the Deity sits enthroned with unrivalled influence, every subjugated passion, 'like the wind and storm, fulfilling his word.'"

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XIII. THE TEMPLE.--GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Origin of the Order of Templars--First Home of the Order--Removal to the Banks of the Thames--Rules of the Order--The Templars at the Crusades, and their Deeds of Valour--Decay and Corruption of the Order--Charges brought against the Knights--Abolition of the Order.

The Order of Knights Templars, established by Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, in 1118, to protect Christian pilgrims on their road to Jerusalem, first found a home in England in 1128 (Henry I.), when Hugh de Payens, the first Master of the Order, visited our shores to obtain succours and subsidies against the Infidel.

The proud, and at first zealous, brotherhood originally settled on the south side of Holborn, without the Bars. Indeed, about a century and a half ago, part of a round chapel, built of Caen stone, was found under the foundation of some old houses at the Holborn end of Southampton Buildings. In time, however, the Order amassed riches, and, growing ambitious, purchased a large space of ground extending from Fleet Street to the river, and from Whitefriars to Essex House in the Strand. The new Temple was a vast monastery, fitted for the residence of the prior, his chaplain, serving brethren and knights; and it boasted a council-chamber, a refectory, a barrack, a church, a range of cloisters, and a river terrace for religious meditation, military exercise, and the training of chargers. In 1185 Heraclius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who had come to England with the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital to procure help from Henry II. against the victorious Saladin, consecrated the beautiful river-side church, which the proud Order had dedicated to the Virgin Lady Mary. The late Master of the Temple had only recently died in a dungeon at Damascus, and the new Master of the Hospital, after the great defeat of the Christians at Jacob's Ford, on the Jordan, had swam the river covered with wounds, and escaped to the Castle of Beaufort.

The singular rules of the "Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ and of the Temple of Solomon," were revised by the first Abbot of Clairvaux, St. Bernard himself. Extremely austere and earnest, they were divided into seventy-two heads, and enjoined severe and constant devotional exercises, self-mortification, fasting, prayer, and regular attendance at matins, vespers, and all the services of the Church. Dining in one common refectory, the Templars were to make known wants that could not be expressed by signs, in a gentle, soft, and private way. Two and two were in general to live together, so that one might watch the other. After departing from the supper hall to bed it was not permitted them to speak again in public, except upon urgent necessity, and then only in an undertone. All scurrility, jests, and idle words were to be avoided; and after any foolish saying, the repetition of the Lord's Prayer was enjoined. All professed knights were to wear white garments, both in summer and winter, as emblems of chastity. The esquires and retainers were required to wear black or, in provinces where that coloured cloth could not be procured, brown. No gold or silver was to be used in bridles, breastplates, or spears, and if ever that furniture was given them in charity, it was to be discoloured to prevent an appearance of superiority or arrogance. No brother was to receive or despatch letters without the leave of the master or procurator, who might read them if he chose. No gift was to be accepted by a Templar till permission was first obtained from the Master. No knight should talk to any brother of his previous frolics and irregularities in the world. No brother, in pursuit of worldly delight, was to hawk, to shoot in the woods with long or crossbow, to halloo to dogs, or to spur a horse after game. There might be married brothers, but they were to leave part of their goods to the chapter, and not to wear the white habit. Widows were not to dwell in the preceptories. When travelling, Templars were to lodge only with men of the best repute, and to keep a light burning all night "lest the dark enemy, from whom God preserve us, should find some opportunity." Unrepentant brothers were to be cast out. Last of all, every Templar was to shun "feminine kisses," whether from widow, virgin, mother, sister, aunt, or any other woman.

During six of the seven Crusades (1096-1272), during which the Christians of Europe endeavoured, with tremendous yet fitful energy, to wrest the birthplace of Christianity from the equally fanatic Moslems, the Knights Templars fought bravely among the foremost. Whether by the side of Godfrey of Bouillon, Louis VII., Philip V., Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis IX., or Prince Edward, the stern, sunburnt men in the white mantles were ever foremost in the shock of spears. Under many a clump of palm trees, in many a scorched desert track, by many a hill fortress, smitten with sabre or pierced with arrow, the holy brotherhood dug the graves of their slain companions.

A few of the deeds, which must have been so often talked of upon the Temple terrace and in the Temple cloister, must be narrated, to show that, however mistaken was the ideal of the Crusaders, these monkish warriors fought their best to turn it into a reality. In 1146 the whole brotherhood joined the second Crusade, and protected the rear of the Christian army in its toilsome march through Asia Minor. In 1151, the Order saved Jerusalem, and drove back the Infidels with terrible slaughter. Two years later the Master of the Temple was slain, with many of the white mantles, in fiercely essaying to storm the walls of Ascalon. Three years after this 300 Templars were slain in a Moslem ambuscade, near Tiberias, and 87 were taken prisoners. We next find the Templars repelling the redoubtable Saladin from Gaza; and in a great battle near Ascalon, in 1177, the Master of the Temple and ten knights broke through the Mameluke Guards, and all but captured Saladin in his tent. The Templars certainly had their share of Infidel blows, for, in 1178, the whole Order was nearly slain in a battle with Saladin; and in another fierce conflict, only the Grand Master and two knights escaped; while again at Tiberias, in 1187, they received a cruel repulse, and were all but totally destroyed.

In 1187, when Saladin took Jerusalem, he next besieged the great Templar stronghold of Tyre; and soon after a body of the knights, sent from London, attacked Saladin's camp in vain, and the Grand Master and nearly half of the Order perished. In the subsequent siege of Acre the Crusaders lost nearly 100,000 men in nine pitched battles. In 1191, however, Acre was taken, and the Kings of France and England, and the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital, gave the throne of the Latin kingdom to Guy de Lusignan. When Richard Coeur de Lion had cruelly put to death 2,000 Moslem prisoners, we find the Templars interposing to prevent Richard and the English fighting against the Austrian allies; and soon after the Templars bought Cyprus of Richard for 300,000 livres of gold. In the advance to Jerusalem the Templars led the van of Richard's army. When the attack on Jerusalem was suspended, the Templars followed Richard to Ascalon, and soon afterwards gave Cyprus to Guy de Lusignan, on condition of his surrendering the Latin crown. When Richard abandoned the Crusade, after his treaty with Saladin, it was the Templars who gave him a galley and the disguise of a Templar's white robe to secure his safe passage to an Adriatic port. Upon Richard's departure they erected many fortresses in Palestine, especially one on Mount Carmel, which they named Pilgrim's Castle.

The fourth Crusade was looked on unfavourably by the brotherhood, who now wished to remain at peace with the Infidel, but they nevertheless soon warmed to the fighting, and we find a band of the white mantles defeated and slain at Jaffa. With a second division of Crusaders the Templars quarrelled, and were then deserted by them. Soon after the Templars and Hospitallers, now grown corrupt and rich, quarrelled about lands and fortresses; but they were still favoured by the Pope, and helped to maintain the Latin throne. In 1209 they were strong enough to resist the interdict of Pope Innocent; and in the Crusade of 1217 they invaded Egypt, and took Damietta by assault, but, at the same time, to the indignation of England, wrote home urgently for more money. An attack on Cairo proving disastrous, they concluded a truce with the Sultan in 1221. In the Crusade of the Emperor Frederick the Templars refused to join an excommunicated man. In 1240, the Templars wrested Jerusalem from the Sultan of Damascus, but, in 1243, were ousted by the Sultan of Egypt and the Sultan of Damascus, and were almost exterminated in a two days' battle; and, in 1250, they were again defeated at Mansourah. When King Louis was taken prisoner, the Infidels demanded the surrender of all the Templar fortresses in Palestine, but eventually accepted Damietta alone and a ransom, which Louis exacted from the Templars. In 1257 the Moguls and Tartars took Jerusalem, and almost annihilated the Order, whose instant submission they required. In 1268 Pope Urban excommunicated the Marshal of the Order, but the Templars nevertheless held by their comrade, and Bendocdar, the Mameluke, took all the castles belonging to the Templars in Armenia, and also stormed Antioch, which had been a Christian city 170 years.

After Prince Edward's Crusade the Templars were close pressed. In 1291, Aschraf Khalil besieged the two Orders and 12,000 Christians in Acre for six terrible weeks. The town was stormed, and all the Christian prisoners, who flew to the Infidel camp, were ruthlessly beheaded. A few of the Templars flew to the Convent of the Temple, and there perished; the Grand Master had already fallen; a handful of the knights only escaping to Cyprus.

The persecution of the now corrupt and useless Order commenced sixteen years afterwards. In 1306, both in London and Paris, terrible murmurs arose at their infidelity and their vices. At the Church of St. Martin's, Ludgate, where the English Templars were accused, the following charges were brought against them:--

1. That at their first reception into the Order, they were admonished by those who had received them within the bosom of the fraternity to deny Christ, the crucifixion, the blessed Virgin, and all the saints. 5. That the receivers instructed those that were received that Christ was not the true God. 7. That they said Christ had not suffered for the redemption of mankind, nor been crucified but for His own sins. 9. That they made those they received into the Order spit upon the cross. 10. That they caused the cross itself to be trampled under foot. 11. That the brethren themselves did sometimes trample on the same cross. 14. That they worshipped a cat, which was placed in the midst of the congregation. 16. That they did not believe the sacrament of the altar, nor the other sacraments of the Church. 24. That they believed that the Grand Master of the Order could absolve them from their sins. 25. That the visitor could do so. 26. That the preceptors, of whom many were laymen, could do it. 36. That the receptions of the brethren were made clandestinely. 37. That none were present but the brothers of the said Order. 38. That for this reason there has for a long time been a vehement suspicion against them. 46. That the brothers themselves had idols in every province, viz., heads, some of which had three faces, and some one, and some a man's skull. 47. That they adored that idol, or those idols, especially in their great chapters and assemblies. 48. That they worshipped them. 49. As their God. 50. As their saviour. 51. That some of them did so. 52. That the greater part did. 53. They said those heads could save them. 54. That they could produce riches. 55. That they had given to the Order all its wealth. 56. That they caused the earth to bring forth seed. 57. That they made the trees to flourish. 58. That they bound or touched the heads of the said idols with cords, wherewith they bound themselves about their shirts, or next their skins. 59. That at their reception, the aforesaid little cords, or others of the same length, were delivered to each of the brothers. 61. That it was enjoined them to gird themselves with the said little cords, as before mentioned, and continually to wear them. 62. That the brethren of the Order were generally received in that manner. 63. That they did these things out of devotion. 64. That they did them everywhere. 65. That the greater part did. 66. That those who refused the things above mentioned at their reception, or to observe them afterwards, were killed or cast into prison.

The Order was proud and arrogant, and had many enemies. The Order was rich, and spoil would reward its persecutors. The charges against the knights were eagerly believed; many of the Templars were burned at the stake in Paris, and many more in various parts of France. In England their punishment seems to have been less severe. The Order was formally abolished by Pope Clement V., in the year 1312.

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