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THE JOHNSONIAN CORNER " 18

DR. JOHNSON'S CHAIR " 22

AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE " 23

"THE WAY IN" " 27

THE BAR " 37

"THE WAY OUT" " 38

DR. JOHNSON'S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE " 55

ENTRANCE TO THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE IN WINE OFFICE COURT 5

STAIRCASE IN "OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE" 8

CHESHIRE COURT AT SIDE OF OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE 25

FRONTISPIECE OF BILL OF FARE 78

PRINTED BY

EDEN FISHER & CO., LTD., 95-97, FENCHURCH ST.,

LONDON, E.C.

EARLY HISTORY OF YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE

Time consecrates; And what is grey with age becomes religion.--SCHILLER.

Old London is fast disappearing off the face of the earth. One by one its ancient taverns have gone, or if the names familiar to our ancestors have been retained, the hand of the builder has been laid remorselessly on the structures our forefathers knew, and they have been transformed beyond recognition. One of them, however, survives, untouched by the hand of time, spared by the vitality of the traditions, literary and other, which it enshrines, and that is the Cheshire Cheese. Though its story reaches back long before the eighteenth century, it is with the memory of Dr. Johnson and his more brilliant contemporaries that it is very largely associated in the minds of men. It is in a special sense London's living memorial of the great Lexicographer. Amid the changes which have altered Fleet Street almost beyond recognition by the Doctor and his contemporaries, it stands safe still, its old activities in full swing in the narrow backwater of Wine Office Court, a venerable reminder of the past. That men should be possessed with an unwearying curiosity about the old tavern which was so much the haunt of the mighty literary potentate who was the patron and friend of Goldsmith, is but natural. They feel for it what the devotee feels for a shrine. Dr. Johnson was not himself indifferent to a sentiment of the sort, and just as we take an intense interest in the "Cheshire Cheese" which he frequented, so he, in his day, was sympathetically curious as to the places which Dryden half a century or so before the Doctor's time had made sacred to literary memory by his presence.

"When I was a young fellow," he says, "I wanted to write the life of Dryden, and in order to get materials I applied to the only two persons then alive who had seen him; these were old Swinney and old Cibber. Swinney's information was no more than this, 'That at Will's Coffee-house, Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was set by the fire in winter and then called his winter chair, and that it was carried out for him to the balcony in summer, and then called his summer chair.' I went and sat in it."

Thanks, therefore, to the fact that we have one specimen of the Johnsonian tavern remaining practically the same as it was in the Johnsonian days, we can still depict for ourselves, with but the slightest effort of the imagination, what must have been the scene at the Cheshire Cheese in the Doctor's time. Johnson is there in his favourite seat, mouthing and talking as who should say: "I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark." One or other of his friends is never wanting to keep him company--Burke, or Goldsmith, or it may be Langton or Beauclerk. But the inn is with us, though the men of the eighteenth century are gone.

Even then the tavern as a club was beginning to fall into comparative decay. Fashion was voting for the club proper, proprietary or otherwise, and the habit of ceasing to live in the City carried away the old frequenters of the Fleet Street taverns into the suburbs or the more distant environs of London. Washington Irving gives us in his "Sketch Book" a charming account of one of the city of London hostelries, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The opening of the description would serve for the Cheshire Cheese of to-day. "This has been a temple of Mirth and Wine from time immemorial. It has always been in the family, so that its history is tolerably well preserved by the present landlord. It was much frequented by the gallants and cavalieros of the reign of Elizabeth, and was looked into now and then by the wits of Charles the Second. The members of the club which now holds its weekly sessions there abound in old catches, glees, and choice stories that are traditional in the place. The life of the club, and indeed the prime wit of the neighbourhood, is mine host himself. At the opening of every club night he is called in to sing his 'Confession of Faith,' which is the famous old drinking troll from Gammer Gurton's 'Needle.'" Washington Irving gives the words of the four verses of the song with chorus, the first of which, as a specimen of an old-time City tavern song, may suffice to be produced here:

I cannot eate but little meat, My stomack is not good; But sure I think that I can drink With him that wears a hood. Though I go bare, take ye no care, I nothing am acold. I stuff my skin so full within With jolly good ale and old.

But from the time of Dr. Johnson down to the present day unbroken links of tradition connect the Cheshire Cheese of the twentieth century with the Cheshire Cheese of the eighteenth, and through that with all the taverns in story, which begin with the Tabard and pass on, through the Mermaid and the rest, to the old house in Wine Office Court. This venerable survivor of a vanished race has a double interest: to the lover of antiquity in general it appeals as the type of the place our forefathers loved; to the lover of the Johnsonian cycle, as enabling him to picture to himself what that race of giants did, where they ate and drank, and where they talked. That they had reason for their choice of an inn, and could give a reason for that choice too, is plain from a well-known passage in Boswell, which runs as follows:--

"There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it cannot be; there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests, the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man but a very impudent dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man's house as if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give" , "the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn."

Although the origin of the Old Cheshire Cheese is not altogether involved in obscurity, there is a decided want of complete, or even semi-complete, details as to its very early history; but it is much more affluent in literary anecdote.

It was in the Old Cheshire Cheese that the dispute arose about who would most quickly make the best couplet. One said:--

I, Sylvester, Kiss'd your sister.

The other's retort was:

I, Ben Jonson, Kiss'd your wife.

"But that's not rhyme," said Sylvester. "No," said Jonson; "but it's true."

A later poet, Lord Tennyson, was himself a frequenter of the "Cheese" in his young days, while it was there that Isaac Bickerstaff made the epigram:

When late I attempted your pity to move, What made you so deaf to my prayers? Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But--why did you kick me down stairs?

In fact, the "Cheese" was famous for epigrammatists. Who would not like to have seen the face of the old glutton and scandalmonger when, in the "Cheese," the following lines were solemnly presented to him?--

You say your teeth are dropping out-- A serious cause of sorrow, Not likely to be cured, I doubt, To-day, or yet to-morrow. But good may come of this distress, While under it you labour, If, losing teeth you guzzle less, And don't backbite your neighbour.

Wine Office Court, where the Cheshire Cheese is situated, took its name from the fact that wine licences were granted in a building close by. The present "wine office" of the Old Cheshire Cheese is exactly at the junction of the Court and Fleet Street.

"In this court," says Mr. Noble, "once flourished a fig tree, planted a century ago by the vicar of St. Bride's, who resided 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."

JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH AT THE "CHEESE"

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.--JOHNSON.

The sentimental attractions are equally strong, and their influence is felt even by the most occasional of guests whose situation in life, or whose distance from London, unfortunately precludes their being regular attendants at the hostelry. A fine acrostic sent to the landlord by the Rev. William Kerr-Smith, Vicar of Whiteby, Newcastle-on-Tyne, embodies some of the thoughts that naturally arise in the mind of the cultivated visitant:

C hanged are the times and changed, alas, the guests! H ow changed from those who erst with gossip stored E ach day saw grouped about thy cheerful board! S till are their voices now, whose noisy jests H ave filled these rooms with laughter. Gathered here I n rare confusion Beau, and Wit and Sage, R ich, Poor and Spendthrift, Youth and fuller age E njoyed whilst yet they might thy festive cheer.

C areless of censure each one told his tale, H eard the last scandal as he quaffed his ale. E ager to praise, they scrupled not to school, E njoyed the folly, but condemned the fool. S o lived they far removed from dulness dire, E schewed the commonplace and tuned the lyre.

TO THE LAWYERS AND GENTLEMEN WITH WHOM I HAVE DINED FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY AT THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE TAVERN WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET THIS WORK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THEIR OBEDIENT SERVANT CYRUS JAY

In his preface Mr. Jay says: "During the fifty-five years that I have frequented the Cheshire Cheese Tavern ... there have been only three landlords. When I first visited the house I used to meet several very old gentlemen, who remembered Dr. Johnson, nightly at the Cheshire Cheese; and they have told me, what is not generally known, that the Doctor, whilst living in the Temple, always went to the Mitre or the Essex Head; but when he removed to Gough Square and Bolt Court he was a constant visitor at the Cheshire Cheese, because nothing but a hurricane would have induced him to cross Fleet Street."

Mr. Jay's fifty-five years, from 1868, take us back to 1813, or little more than a quarter of a century after the death of Johnson. But who then was Mr. Jay, and what are his claims to credibility? "I have heard," says Dr. Birkbeck Hill, that indefatigable inquirer into Johnsonian facts and dates, "a member of our club relate that, when he was a student of law, there used to be pointed out to him in the Cheshire Cheese an old gentleman who, day after day, was always to be found there, prolonging his dinner by an unbroken succession of glasses of gin and water. It was as a kind of awful warning of the depths to which a lawyer might sink, that this toper was shown, and it was added in a whisper that he was the son of Jay, of Bath. Jay, of Bath, is well-nigh forgotten now, but during the first half of the present century his fame as a preacher stood exceedingly high. It was Cyrus Jay, his son, who for fifty-three years frequenting this ancient tavern, preserved and handed down this curious tradition of Johnson. The landlord has told me how, in his childhood, he used to hear in the distance the gruff voice of the old gentleman as he came along Fleet Street, and how sometimes he was sent to see Mr. Jay safe home to his chambers at 15 Serjeants' Inn hard by. For most of his long life, port, that medium liquor, neither like claret for boys nor brandy for heroes, but the drink for men, had been his favourite beverage. A failing income brought him down at last to gin and water. He used to comfort himself by the reflection that he could get twice as drunk for half the money. He dined in the tavern to the very end. One evening he was led home to his lodgings, and within four-and-twenty hours he was dead. He was the last frequenter of the Old Cheshire Cheese who knew the men who had known Johnson. Mine host remembers a still older guest, Dr. Pooley by name, a barrister, who died about 1856, at the age of eighty. Night after night for many a long year he had dined at half-past seven to the minute on a 'follower,' the end chop of the loin. He, too, used to tell of the men of his younger days, who boasted that they had often spent an evening there with Dr. Samuel Johnson."

Another writer, Mr. Cyrus Redding, who went to live in Gough Square in 1806, in his "Fifty Years' Recollections, Literary and Personal," published in 1858, takes us a little further back. He says:

"I often dined at the Cheshire Cheese. Johnson and his friends, I was informed, used to do the same, and I was told I should see individuals who had met them there. This I found to be correct. The company was more select than in later times. Johnson had been dead about twenty years, but there were Fleet Street tradesmen who well remembered both Johnson and Goldsmith in this place of entertainment."

Mr. Cyrus Jay, deploring the loss of the Mitre, the Cock, and other old taverns, remarks, "There still remains the Old Cheshire Cheese, in Wine Office Court, which will afford the present generation, it is hoped, for some years to come, an opportunity of witnessing the kind of tavern in which our forefathers delighted to assemble for refreshment.

"There was a Mr. Tyers, a silk merchant on Ludgate Hill, and Colonel Laurence, who carried the colours of the 20th regiment at the battle of Minden, ever fond of repeating that his regimental comrades bore the brunt on that memorable day. The evening was the time we thus met. There was also a sprinkling of lawyers, old demisoldes and men of science; among the latter was a Mr. Adams, an optician, of Fleet St.

"Colonel Laurence showed me Goldsmith's tomb in the Temple Churchyard; he was never tired of talking of his acquaintance with the poet, whom he knew when Goldsmith, as well as Johnson, lived hard by the Cheshire Cheese. I listened with eagerness to what these men of other days told me. Tyers broke a leg, and was confined to his bed for a long time, and the rubicund-cheeked Colonel passed the way of all the earth in a year or two after I first became acquainted with him. He used to speak of Goldsmith's ordinary person, and told me the poet never broke in upon the conversation when Johnson was talking.

"The left-hand room, entering the 'Cheshire,' and the table on the extreme right upon entering that room, was the table occupied by Johnson and his friends almost uniformly. This table and the room are now as they were when I first saw them, having had the curiosity to visit them recently. They were, and are still, as Johnson and his friends left them in their time. Goldsmith sat at Johnson's left hand." But the public room on the ground floor was not the only place affected by Johnson and his friends. When they wished to retire from the madding crowd a little room on another floor supplied all the privacy they occasionally desired, and here to this day is carefully preserved the chair from which the Doctor thundered."

RELICS AND ART TREASURES OF "THE CHESHIRE CHEESE"

"There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn."--JOHNSON.

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