LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

“TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE,” by W. Dendy Sadler[Frontispiece]
“THE COSY CORNER” IN OLD CHESHIRE CHEESEto face p.[13]
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]

IN TEXT

PAGE
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.

“TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE.” By W. Dendy Sadler.
By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, owner of the Copyright.

A Storied Tavern.

CHAPTER I
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.

Chorus: Back and side go bare, go bare,

Both foote and hand go cold;

But belly! God send thee good ale enough,

Whether it be new or 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:—

ENTRANCE TO THE “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE” IN WINE OFFICE COURT.

From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton.

“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” (we should remember that this was said in the rougher world of the last century), “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 (formerly spelt “Ye Olde Cheshire Chese”) 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.

That Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and other distinguished men were in the habit of frequenting the Old Cheshire Cheese, there can be no manner of doubt, and they knew what they were about in choosing their place of rendezvous, for I find in a brochure entitled “Round London” (1725), that the house is described as “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Tavern, near ye Flete Prison, an eating-house for goodly fare.”

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.”

STAIRCASE IN “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.”

From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton.

CHAPTER II
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.

Not the least delightful characteristic of the “Cheese” is the persistency of its old customers. Those who once have been admitted to its charmed circle soon become wedded to its ways. It is not merely to the goodly cheer provided there that this loyalty is due, although, no doubt, to the viands and the wines a share of it is to be attributed. An anecdote of the late Mr. George Augustus Sala, the well-known writer, Daily Telegraph special correspondent, and genial bon vivant and gastronomist, is delightfully illustrative of the attractions of the place from the side of the creature comforts. The story is told by the London correspondent of the Liverpool Courier (December 10, 1895) in recording Mr. Sala’s death. He writes: “Some years ago Mr. Sala went to Paris on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, to write on the subject of French cooking and French restaurants. Such praise of Parisian kickshaws was never lavished before, and the extollation, to the complete discomfiture of English cooks, lasted for fully six weeks. Everything in the cooking line in Paris was grand, everything in England in the same line was horrible. At the end of the six weeks Mr. Sala returned to London, went immediately to the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street and said to the head waiter—‘William, bring me a beefsteak, some potatoes in their jackets, and a pint of ale. I’ve had nothing to eat for six weeks.’”

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.

Among the bygone guests with whose memory the Cheshire Cheese is fragrant, not the least notable was the immortal author of “The Deserted Village” and “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Indeed he was its very near neighbour, for Goldsmith’s lodging was at No. 6 Wine Office Court, nearly opposite the “Cheese,” and here he wrote “The Vicar of Wakefield.” It was on Johnson’s first visit to supper here with Goldsmith that Percy called for him on his way, and found him dressed in a new suit of clothes and well-powdered wig. Noticing Johnson’s unusual smartness, he heard from him the reason of it. “Sir, Goldsmith is a great sloven, and justifies his disregard of propriety by my practice. To-night I desire to show him a better example.” Johnson’s house, where the Dictionary was compiled, was within a minute’s walk, in Gough Square. Boswell does not record any visits to the “Cheese,” but Boswell’s acquaintance with Johnson began when Johnson was an old man, when he had given up the house in Gough Square, and Goldsmith had long departed from Wine Office Court. At the best, Boswell only knew Johnson’s life in widely separated sections. Boswell was in Edinburgh while Johnson was in Bolt Court, and it is certain Johnson wrote no diary for the benefit of his biographer. Witnesses who were on the spot supply the deficiency. Some of them Mr. Cyrus Jay, in a little book entitled, “The Law—What I have Seen, Heard and Known,” published in 1868, states that he had met. The book contains this inscription:

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 (the Johnson) 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.”

“THE COSY CORNER” IN OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.

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.”

CHAPTER III
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.

About half-way up Fleet Street, on the right or northern side if we are coming from Ludgate Circus, the sign of “The Cheshire Cheese” meets the eye of the wayfarer, and intimates to him the near presence of the famous hostelry. There are two approaches, the western by Wine Office Court, the other by the passage way leading to the annexe. We will take the western, by Wine Office Court, because up it have often strolled side by side Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, the latter parting for a moment with his dictatorial friend at the portals of “The Cheese” to go on to his lodgings a dozen yards further up the court on the other side the way. The sign beneath which the Doctor stands intimates to all and sundry that “The Cheshire Cheese” was rebuilt in 1667, seven years after the glorious Restoration, on the site of that older Cheshire Cheese, where Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and many another Elizabethan wit were wont to quaff their sack amid laughter and eager bandying of jest. We will leave the Doctor to make for his favourite seat in the room on the left, while we enter the bar. This is a delightful apartment in its tranquil reminder of the past. Ranged round it are a number of valuable punch bowls, of which we can imagine Mr. Pickwick if he were on a visit here took elaborate and reverential note. They speak eloquently of countless noctes ambrosianæ, when the wit and the liquor were alike of the best. The bar of the Cheshire Cheese has seen them drained to the last drop with effusive enthusiasm when the news of Blenheim, and Oudenarde, and Ramilies arrived, or later for Dettingen and Minden. We can imagine the punch was not without its tributory tears when its patriotic customers suddenly learnt that Nelson had fallen in the hour of victory, though there was nothing lachrymal to dilute their jovial joy in the frequent triumphs of “The Iron Duke.” If the old punch bowls could but speak! But the very air of the place is redolent of the past, both storied and convivial, and eloquent for him who but pauses to think and to recall.

One of the most touching things about “The Cheese” is the way in which it treasures the memory of its old servants. “William” has actually given his name to a room, and there over the fireplace of the bar just opposite the door is his portrait, the portrait of William Simpson, who commenced waiter at “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” Chop-house in 1829. “This picture,” says the inscription below, “was subscribed for by the gentlemen frequenting the Coffee Room, and presented to Mr. Dolamore (the Landlord) to be handed down as an heirloom to all future Landlords of ‘Ye old Cheshire Cheese,’ Wine Office Court Fleet Street.” The name of the artist is unknown. It is worth noting that in this inscription the room in which we stand is called a Coffee Room. Its modern designation of “the bar” therefore is of comparatively recent origin.

The two small oil paintings on either side this heirloom were painted in 1883 by William Allen. One of them depicts the interior of the old bar, the other its exterior. To the right of the fireplace is a striking and important painting. It is a portrait, but it is not certainly known of whom. Tradition varies, and while according to some it is a portrait of Dean Swift, others maintain that here we have the counterfeit presentment of the first proprietor of the house after the Great Fire, Theophilus B. Cruneble. There are other objects of interest in the room, particularly worth notice being the old china and glass. Nor must we omit to mention the young ladies behind the bar, but it is for the visitor to appraise their grace and charm. Beauty draws the human heart in every generation, and the men of Johnson’s day were no less susceptible to its appeal than are we. The picture upstairs, near the “Grandfather’s Clock,” would have fired their imaginations as readily as it does ours.

But now, turning from the bar over which Hebes of our twentieth century so efficiently preside, we pass to the room opposite, and immediately on the left of the passage way as we enter. This room has not changed its character or its furniture for centuries. If Dr. Johnson were to come in now and go by us to his corner seat there to the right of the fireplace, he would find things essentially much as he left them. If his ghost wanders about Fleet Street, it must be a great relief to it to get, when it can, back safe into its unchanging old haunt, out of reach of the structural revolutions which elsewhere time has wrought.

As in the bar, the important picture in this room is that of a waiter. It is a portrait of Henry Todd, as the inscription informs us, who commenced waiter at the Olde Cheshire Cheese the 27th February, 1812. It was painted by Wageman, July, 1827, and “subscribed for by the gentlemen frequenting the Coffee Room, and presented to Mr. Dolamore (the landlord) in trust to be handed down as an heirloom to all future landlords of the Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.”

Two oil paintings by Seymour Lucas, R.A., of the dining-room, with portraits of customers, will repay inspection, while above Dr. Johnson’s old seat is an oil painting of the Lexicographer himself, a copy of the famous portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, now preserved in the National Gallery. Underneath may be read the following inscription:—“The Favourite Seat of Dr. Johnson. Born 18th Septr., 1709. Died 13th Decr., 1784. In him a noble understanding and a masterly intellect were united. With grand independence of character, and unfailing goodness of heart, which won the admiration of his own age and remain as recommendations to the reverence of posterity. ‘No, Sir! there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness has been produced as by a good tavern.—Johnson.’”

Hard by are two interesting old prints, one of Dr. Johnson rescuing Oliver Goldsmith from his landlady, the other of a literary party at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Then there is an oil painting of a family group in which the Doctor is easily to be recognised. More modern, but still well worthy of inspection, is an artist’s proof, signed by the artist himself, of the well-known picture—“Toddy at the Cheese.” This is the painter, Mr. Dendy Sadler’s own gift to the house, the interior of whose dining-room he has so genially portrayed. Noticeable adjuncts of the apartments also are two old water-bottles, one of leather, the other of stone, and of what is known as Godstone ware.

THE JOHNSONIAN CORNER.

The old staircase is well worth careful attention, having stood marvellously the test of time. If we ascend it we arrive at the first floor and William’s room, to which an announcement on the wainscot at the foot of the stairs served as a guide. It is immediately on our left when we reach the landing, perpetuating with its name the memory of Mr. Dolamore’s faithful old henchman. Its most interesting feature is a second copy in oils of the portrait of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds, to which I have just made allusion. But it is much more than a mere replica of the copy downstairs in the dining-room. It is a copy, indeed, but a very old copy, and dates back to the Doctor’s own time. It was painted in order that it might adorn the room at “The Mitre,” in Chancery Lane, where the club founded by Dr. Johnson first held its meetings. Dr. Johnson’s “Mitre” has long since been pulled down, but the club he founded exists, and meets several times a year in William’s room. Two prints next claim our attention—a coloured one of Dr. Johnson’s House in Gough Square, the other a book print of Dr. Johnson, who is also shown to us in a framed wax bas-relief model.

About the room also are a number of sepia drawings of the various parts of the house—the work of that accomplished artist, F. Cox—while there are several pictures on the wall which serve to show that the tastes of the frequenters of the “Cheese” are not limited to literature and journalism. For example, we have “Roach, Perch and Dace,” and “Salmon Trout” and “Trout,” by C. Foster, a coloured print of steeple-chasing, a portrait of Lord Palmerston, engraved by F. Holl from the painting by F. Grant; a landscape of considerable merit by an unknown artist, and a view of Fleet Street, showing the entrance to Wine Office Court. Very interesting too is a print of the meeting of Dr. Johnson and Flora Macdonald in the Isle of Skye in the year 1773. This valuable work was recently exhibited at the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 at Shepherd’s Bush.

Issuing from this room, which embalms the memory of “William,” we must pause at the foot of the flight of stairs leading to the next floor to admire a handsome old grandfather’s clock, which even in Dr. Johnson’s time was venerable by reason of its years, as it was almost certainly part of the furniture of “The Cheese” when the hostelry was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1667. It is not impossible it was ticking off the flight of time when Hawkins and other Elizabethan sea captains were harrying the warships of the great Armada in its progress up the British Channel. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may have studied that ancient clock-face which would warn them that it was desirable to cut short their pleasant revelry and hasten to the theatre. We pass on with a lingering look, and the next turn in the old staircase brings us to a private room, containing one of the most valued treasures of the Cheshire Cheese, nothing less than the original chair used by Dr. Johnson at the Mitre, the old Chancery Lane tavern, patronised occasionally by the Doctor and now pulled down. This chair was acquired by the proprietor of the Cheshire Cheese, and sedulously protected from all accident and injury. The better to ensure this end it is now enclosed in a glass case. On the back of the chair is a medallion of Dr. Johnson with the inscription—“Born Sept. 7th, 1709. Died Dec. 13th, 1784.” Copies of the chair can be supplied to order in oak at £5 each, but the medallion and inscriptions, which are perhaps modern, or at least post-Johnsonian additions to the original chair, are not copied. A notice card upon the seat of the chair announces to the visitor that “This chair was in daily use by Dr. Samuel Johnson,” while below follows the quotation:—“More regal in his state than many kings.” Though he passed away when George Washington was in the zenith of his renown after splendid epoch-making achievement in arms and diplomacy and council, the memory of the great Doctor is as fresh and fragrant as ever, as on the day when he last sat in the chair before us, the oracle of a select company of wits and scholars. It is idle to moralise further on this more than royal relic. Each intelligent visitor, as he reverently contemplates it, will pursue his own line of reflection.

Turning from the chair we find at the other end of the room a glass-fronted cupboard, which contains many original samples of the old willow pattern plate and also of the unique badge plate, which has been in use in the house for many years. Here, too, are several specimens of the old punch glasses, which have found favour with so many generations of convives of the Cheshire Cheese. The stranger is not perhaps without a tremor of gastronomic emotion when the spoon used for at least three generations, probably for a period of over a century, in stirring the pudding is pointed out to him. Hard by on the walls of the room are seven old prints from Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress.”

The great artistic treasures of this room are, however, three important paintings, which have recently been restored by Messrs. William Marchant & Co., of the Goupil Gallery, 5 Regent Street. The first, which looks down on the chair of Dr. Johnson in its glass shrine, is an oil painting of a boy and dog. On the back of the picture is written:—“David Boyle, aged 10.” “Ye 19th of July, 1691.” So that it was painted eighteen years before the birth of Dr. Johnson. On the opposite wall is another oil painting, a still life picture, attributed by competent critics to Peter Boel, who lived from 1626 to 1680, and was a pupil of Snyders. The third of these oil paintings is a figure picture, probably of “Diana,” by Charles Le Brun, or the school (France, XVII. century).

In the smoking-room adjoining there is nothing of special interest for visitors, since this apartment is mainly devoted to the smoking of churchwarden pipes and to the consumption of “goes” of rack, cork, and, above all, of Punch, for the right compounding of which Ye Old Cheshire Cheese enjoys a reputation so deservedly high. Here take place noteworthy arguments, conducted with much skill and logical acumen by the regular customers, each in his own special chair, and each with his own churchwarden pipe in his mouth, or held gracefully poised to emphasise a rhetorical point. A case is provided in which gentlemen may keep from harm the favourite pipes to which use and wont have made them attached. In this room, too, the evening clubs hold their meetings. The subject of “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Clubs” is, however, dealt with elsewhere. Still attention may be drawn to the fact that on the walls of the smoking-room are some interesting pen and ink sketches and drawings relating to the clubs. It would be unbecoming perhaps to omit mention of an engraving of “The Empty Chair at Gadshill,” since it serves to remind us of the intimate association of Charles Dickens with “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,” while it suggests that other empty chair in the next room. Further, a pen and ink drawing of the old bar downstairs, by Joseph Pennell, must not be forgotten, any more than three Phil May sketches, the gift of the Goupil Gallery.

DR. JOHNSON’S CHAIR.

AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.

“An interesting episode in the family history of the House.”

By F. Cox.

(William’s Room in the distance.)

At the foot of the staircase leading up to the apartments sacred to the fair Hebes of the House a sepia drawing by F. Cox claims our notice. It is entitled “An interesting episode in the family history of the House.” A stalwart favourite of the bar is snatching a kiss, while two lovely colleagues of his beautiful victim are tip-toeing down these very stairs to see the fun, and one pretty forehead has just reached the corner of the wainscoting. And now as the smiling beauties to the right of the picture bar our further progress, let us descend to the kitchen, where the most interesting objects are the original coal range and coal grill, which have been in use for over a hundred years. Possibly nowhere in the wide world is there a gastronomic temple of greater renown or more worthy of it, for here have always been cooked in huge copper boilers the famous pudding, the fire being fed and the pudding tended throughout the whole night previous to the solemn and regular introduction of this mammoth delicacy to the longing gaze of its patrons. That is the hour when the analytical observer might make valuable studies of the watering mouth.

Dinners, by the way, are now served in the Annexe. This room has been formed by roofing with glass what was originally a court-yard. It contains amongst the rest two famous original prints by H. Bunbury—“A City Hunt” and “Hyde Park, 1780.” Other interesting prints are “Destruction of the Bastile, July 14, 1789,” after a painting by H. Singleton, and a line engraving by James Heath from a painting by F. Wheatley of “The Riot in Broad Street on the 17th of June, 1773.” Here also is a cabinet containing various articles which may be purchased by visitors. The price list may be conveniently appended here. It runs as follows:—

O.C.C. Ware, etc.Each
s.d.
Three-handle Mugs, silver mounted500
Three-handle Mugs100
Two-handle Mugs76
One-handle Mugs20
One-handle Mugs, silver mounted210
Cream Jugs10
Sugar Basins10
Mustard Pots10
Salt Cellars10
Pepper Pots10
Tea Pots—
Large.Small.
s.d.s.d.
Badged Willow Pattern Plates1008
Badged Willow Pattern Dishes1008
Post Cards.
No. 1 Series6d. per packet.
No. 2 Series6d. per packet.
Coloured Interior1d. each.
Views of the House6d. and 1s.

The above is a fairly complete inventory of the relics and art treasures of the Cheshire Cheese, that ancient hostelry which has become a place of pilgrimage for all in the wide realms of Anglo-Saxondom who cherish the memory of a unique figure in the literary history of the English-speaking peoples. Much has been said and written of the great men of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who have eaten good fare and waxed honestly merry within the precincts of the Cheshire Cheese, but little of the men of note of this generation and the preceding one who have at one time or another been its guests. There are few distinguished Englishmen who have not partaken of its hospitality, and few persons of eminence, whether hailing from the far Antipodes or from the great country over which floats the Stars and Stripes, who would deem a visit to England complete if due homage to the memory of the great Lexicographer in the Johnsonian shrine in Wine Office Court had not been paid. There is nothing to compare with this worship of the mighty literary monarch, unless it is to be found in that of which Shakespeare is the centre, which has made of Stratford-on-Avon the other Mecca of Anglo-Saxondom.

CHESHIRE COURT AT SIDE OF “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.”

CHAPTER IV
MR. JOSEPH PENNELL AND LADY COLIN CAMPBELL ON “THE CHEESE”

Hard by there is the Cheshire Cheese,

A famous tap.—T. Hood.

In the last chapter no mention was made of the fact that in 1887 a remarkable picture of the Cheshire Cheese by Mr. Seymour Lucas, R.A., was exhibited at the Royal Academy, since it is not among the art treasures of the house. It can, however, not be passed by, since Mr. Seymour Lucas and the Cheshire Cheese are mutual friends. We will therefore quote here the description given of the picture by a well-known London evening paper. To Mr. Dendy Sadler’s picture, “Toddy at the Cheshire Cheese,” allusion has already been made.

“THE WAY IN.”

The Pall Mall Gazette of March 29, 1887: “It represents a scene in the Old Cheshire Cheese inn, and is entitled ‘The Latest Scandal.’ In one corner of the quaint old room, on the bench which is still pointed out as the place where Dr. Johnson used to sit, we see a typical group of the wits of the period. Some wear powder, while others have the full dark wigs of an older fashion still. One of the group, in the uniform of the Guards, is relating the latest scandal to the rest, and pointing over his shoulder towards two young beaux, who stand by the fireside. One of these wears his right arm in a sling, and has evidently come to grief in a duel on the previous night. He and his friend are mightily disconcerted to discover that their escapade has become the talk of the town, and that it is affording vast amusement to this group of scandal-mongers.”

What Mr. Seymour Lucas and Mr. Dendy Sadler have so admirably portrayed for us with the brush, an American writer of distinction has both described with his pen and illustrated with his pencil in the pages of Harper’s Weekly. In a November number of that periodical, in 1887, Mr. Joseph Pennell writes as follows:—

“On my first coming to London, I had fortified myself, not with a course of English history, but by re-reading ‘Pickwick.’ My first Sunday morning, about one o’clock, I found myself in Chancery Lane outside the entrance to Lincoln’s Inn, in the company of the proverbial solitary policeman and convivial cat. On my asking the policeman where in the world I could get something to eat—as it is well known one must starve in London on Sunday before one and after three—he gave me the inevitable answer, ‘Down to the bottom, first to your left, under the lamp, up the passage, and there you are!’ After he had repeated these mysterious directions two or three times, and had found me hopelessly ignorant of his meaning, he did what I have very seldom known a London policeman to do—a proof of his loneliness; he walked to the end of Chancery Lane with me, and there being no one in Fleet Street, pointed out the sign of the Cheshire Cheese.... A push at the door, and I have passed into another world. I was in a narrow hall, at the far end of which was a quaint bar, where, framed in by small panes, were two very pretty, but I cannot say fascinating barmaids—I never could be fascinated by the ordinary English barmaid. Suddenly a waiter with a very short nose came out of another room and screamed up the stairs: ‘Cotherum steak. Boatherum foozlum mash. Fotherum coozlum, botherum steak!’ and then remarked to me: ‘Lunch, sir? Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. What can I get you, sir? Steak, sir; chop, sir; kidney, sir; potatoes, sir, cooked in their jackets, sir? Yes, sir; thank you, sir.’ Then up the stairs he added: ‘Underdone steak one!’ Then to me again: ‘Walk in, sir. Take a seat, sir. Paper, sir? Lloyd’s, sir? Reynolds’, sir? Yes, sir.’...

“I had begun to look around me. I found I had stumbled on just what I had determined to make a hunt for. I was in one of the greenbaize-curtained boxes into which Mr. Pickwick was always dropping under the guidance of Sam Weller, whose ‘knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar.’ Unless you have a Sam Weller at your elbow you will not very easily find the Cheshire Cheese, the last of the London chop-houses, even though it is in Baedeker. In the opposite corner was, not Mr. Pickwick, but one of those respectable shabby old gentlemen you never see outside of London. The waiter asked him in the same confidential tone, ‘if he would not have a half-bitter! if he would not like to see yesterday’s Times? A most interestin’ article in it, sir, Mr. Price, sir.’ Then Mr. Price’s half-bitter came in a dented old pewter pot, and along with it an exaggerated wine-glass; and Mr. Price held the pewter in the air, and a softly murmuring stream flowed from the one into the other. Beyond the box I was in I saw other hard straight-backed seats, and between them other most beautifully clean, white cloth-covered tables, at all of which were three or four rather quiet and sedate, but after their manner sociable, Englishmen, everybody seeming to know everybody else in the place. Everything seemed happy, even to the cat purring on the hearth, and the brass kettle singing on the hob. Perhaps I should except the restless waiter, who, when anyone came in, rushed to the bottom of the stairs and gave his unearthly yell. Soon down the same stairs came the translation of the yell in the shape of the steak I had ordered, and with it the potatoes in their jackets, all on old blue willow-ware plates.

“‘Your steak, sir. Yes, sir. Anything else, sir? Napkin, sir? Oh, serviette! Yes, sir. All Americans like them, sir.’

“And so I found for the first time that napkins and bread, freely bestowed in decent restaurants at home, are in England looked upon as costly luxuries.[1]

... “I have returned again and again to the Cheshire Cheese, and have, moreover, tried to induce others to go there with me. For if the place is not haunted, as it is said to be, by the shades of Ben Jonson and Herrick, of Samuel Johnson and Boswell, the waiter is perfectly willing, for a consideration, to point out to you the stains of their wigs on the wall. It is certain that Dickens, Forster, Tom Hood, Wilkie Collins, and many other worthies did frequent it, while Sala periodically puffs it, and a host of other lights have written about it. In my own small way I have endeavoured to lead some modern junior novelists and poets there, to show them how near they could come to some of the great masters whom they apparently worship so thoroughly. But on the only occasion when I succeeded in placing one probably in the seat of Goldsmith or Herrick, he sniffed at the chops and remarked that if Johnson had had a napkin it would have been better for his personal appearance.

“I hardly know myself what is the attraction of the place, for you can only[2] get chops and steaks, kidneys and sausages, or on Saturdays a gigantic pudding, to eat your money’s worth of which you must have the appetite of a Gargantua, or, on Shrove Tuesdays, pancakes. If you should happen to want anything else, you would probably get the answer which Mr. Sala says was given to a friend of his who asked (at the Cock) for a hard boiled egg with his salad: ‘A hegg! If Halbert Hedward ’imself wuz to cum ’ere he couldn’t ’ave a hegg.’ Whoever really cares to see the last of the Old London chop-houses, let him, when next in London, look up the sign of Ye Olde Cheshyre Cheese.”

Not out of place, after the remarks of Mr. Pennell, will be found a vivacious description of a dinner at the “Cheese,” given by Lady Colin Campbell, writing under the pseudonym of “Ina” in the World of August 31, 1892. Its “go” and high spirits render an apology for quoting at length unnecessary. This clever lady writes as follows:—

“It is August, London is empty, and we are bored; yet dine we must somewhere, and where to go is the difficulty. Everybody one knows is either at Homburg or Cowes, so we cannot possibly go to the Savoy or the Amphitryon. There is nothing more utterly stupid than to visit the haunts of society after society has left, and to find them peopled by the unknown—good creatures in their way, no doubt, but not exactly des nôtres; not fashionably dressed enough to admire, nor ridiculously dressed enough to be amusing, and the affairs of whom we cannot discuss, for the simple reason that we know nothing about them, good, bad, or indifferent. How strange it is to think that only a short time ago no lady would ever have dreamed of dining at a London restaurant! Then a few somewhat fast people set the fashion of supping at some public place instead of their own homes; and now there is probably no inhabitant of Mayfair or Belgravia, with any pretensions to smartness, who has not at some time or other either dined or supped at one of the many fashionable cafés which have sprung up in various parts of the town, and have become for a time the rage, only to be displaced by some newer, more pretentious, and more expensive restaurant, to which people flock, quite as much to see and discuss each other as they do to discuss the delicacies provided for them by the latest celebrated chef imported direct from Paris. But, as I said before, dine we must somewhere; and dining at a restaurant being depressing, and dining at home dull, we are just turning over in our minds what we had best do under the circumstances, when there comes a loud peal at the front door bell. We all start up, and”—and, to abridge Lady Colin’s narrative, three ladies and three gentlemen find themselves in Fleet Street “in front of a little narrow alley, suggestive (to me) of robbery and murder. Here we alight, and, with many apologies for the shabbiness of the entrance, our host conducts us—by the back way by mistake—into a dining place. A flare of unshaded gas lights up a small, old-fashioned room, the floor of which is covered with sawdust. The ceiling is white, with projecting cross-beams, and at one side of the room is a long oak table, at which Johnson, Goldsmith, and a few other choice spirits, were wont to sit and feed; and here, it is said, originated the well-known riddle about the number of beefsteaks it would take to reach the moon. All along one side of the room are wooden partitions, exactly like old-fashioned pews, with hard, cushionless sets. One of our party says, as she sits down, that she feels as if she were in church; we devoutly wished she would behave a little more as though she were there, long before the evening was over; but reaction having set in, we are all, I fear, in a terribly frivolous humour, not by any means in keeping with the solemn respectability of our surroundings, for we are told that this chop-house has been in existence ever since the year 1667, and is no ephemeral mushroom-house of the hour, to be sought out one day and forgotten the next.... Our pew just holds six comfortably, and we sit down three and three, opposite each other, on either side of a very narrow table covered with a spotless white cloth. We have willow-pattern plates, large and hot for the meat, and small and cold, each with a pat of butter on it, for our potatoes. First, we have thick slices of hot ham, the lean tender and pink and the fat succulent, with an immense dish of the most delicious peas I ever ate, and young potatoes served in their jackets. Anyone who has tasted a fresh-run salmon which has been green-kippered, and has compared it with the hard, salt fish that is cured for the London market, will appreciate the difference between an ordinary ham and one that is prepared for immediate consumption. These Yorkshire hams were not intended for keeping, and, as the cook afterwards informed us, were all eaten up in a day. I could easily have believed her if she had said one was eaten up at every meal, judging by the thickness of the slices to which we were helped, and the amount we were supposed to eat of them. The next dish is a point steak, rosy without being saignant, accompanied by fresh dishes of young peas and potatoes.... Our somewhat eccentric dinner is brought to a close by a bowl of rum punch, accompanied by six long churchwarden pipes and a glass full of bird’s-eye tobacco.”