We have records of the deaths of two at least of these dramatists on the Bankside—viz., that of Philip Massinger, who died "in his own house, near the play-house on the Bankside," in 1639; and Fletcher, "who dyed of the plague on the 19th of August, 1625." "The parish clerk," says Aubrey, "told me that he was his (Fletcher's) Taylor, and that Mr. Fletcher staying for a suit of cloathes before he retired into the country, Death stopped his journey and laid him low there."

Cheapside, so named from the Chepe, or old London market, along the south side of the site of which it runs, has been a place of barter ever since the reign of Henry VI., when a market was held there daily for the sale of every known commodity. It is easy to see where the vendors of some of the articles had their stands by the names of the surrounding streets—Bread Street, Fish Street, Milk Street, etc. Later on the stalls were transformed into permanent shops, with a dwelling-place for their owners above, and a fair-sized garden at the back. Despite the commercial spirit that has always pervaded this region, it has given birth to two famous poets—the sweet songster Herrick, who sings in one of his poems of

"The golden Cheapside where the earth
Of Julia Herrick gave to me my birth,"

golden, perhaps, having reference to his father, who was a goldsmith; and greater still, John Milton, who first saw the light in Bread Street, at the sign of the "Spread Eagle," in a house which was afterwards destroyed in the Great Fire. It must have been a house of comfortable dimensions, for it covered the site now occupied by Nos. 58 to 63, the business premises of a firm who exhibit a bust of Milton, with an inscription, in a room on their top floor. Milton's father, moreover, had grown rich in his profession, which was that of a scrivener, had been made a Judge, and knighted five years before the birth of his son, so it is evident the poet began life in easy circumstances. He was baptised in All Hallows, a church in Bread Street destroyed in 1897. In Bow Church there is a tablet in memory of Milton, which was taken from All Hallows. When he was ten years of age he began to go to Paul's School, which stood in those days on the east side of St. Paul's Churchyard, between Watling Street and Cheapside. Aubrey records that "when he went to schoole, when he was very young, he studied very hard, and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night, and his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for him, and at these years (ten) he composed many copies of verses which might well have become a riper age." He continued at this school, the old site of which is marked by a tablet on a warehouse, until he was sixteen. Some twenty years later Samuel Pepys was a pupil at Paul's School, and later on in life witnessed its destruction in the Great Fire. Milton would seem to have always cherished a great affection for the city, for after his return from his travels he seldom lived beyond the sound of Bow Bells, once only venturing as far as Westminster; and when he died he was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in the same grave as his father. Indeed, the city proper was the birthplace of several poets, for was not Pope born in Lombard Street, Gray in Cornhill, and Edmund Spenser in East Smithfield, while Lord Macaulay spent his earlier years in Birchin Lane?

Cheapside, with the Cross, as they appeared in 1660.

In the narrow confines of Paternoster Row, where the tall fronts of the houses are so close together that only a thin strip of sky is visible between them, Charlotte Brontë and her sister Anne, fresh from the rugged solitudes of their bleak Yorkshire moors, awoke on the morning of their first visit to the great capital of which they had so often dreamed, and, looking out of the dim windows of the Chapter Coffee-house, saw "the risen sun struggling through the fog, and overhead above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds ... a solemn orbed mass dark blue and dim the dome" (of St. Paul's).

Fleet Street has always been the haunt of the "knights of the pen," and even in these modern days the names of newspapers stare at the passer-by on every side, while at every step he jostles an ink-stained satellite of some great journal. But although these ink-stained ones are to be met with in Fleet Street at every hour of the day and night, they do not live there like the writers of old time—Michael Drayton, for instance, who "lived at ye baye-windowe house next the east end of St. Dunstan's Church"; and Izaak Walton, who kept a linen-draper's shop "in a house two doors west of the end of Chancery Lane," and on his infrequent holidays went a-fishing in the River Lea at Tottenham High Cross. Abraham Cowley, again, was born over his father's grocer's shop, which "abutted on Sargeants' Inn," and here, as a little child, he devoured the Faerie Queen, and was made "irrecoverably a poet." James Shirley lived near the Inner Temple Lane; John Locke in Dorset Court. In Salisbury Square, formerly Salisbury Court, Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, the precursor of Spenser, John Dryden, and Samuel Richardson, all had a residence at one time or another. Richardson built a large printing establishment on the site now occupied by Lloyd's newspaper offices, where he continued to carry on business many years after he had removed his private residence to the West End. He was buried, moreover, in St. Bride's Church in 1761, a large stone in the nave between pews 12 and 13 recording the fact. But greatest and most constant of Fleet Street habitués was Dr. Johnson. For ten years he lived at 17, Gough Square, busy in an upper room upon his great Dictionary. Here he lost his "beloved Tetty," to whose memory he ever remained faithful. "All his affection had been concentrated on her. He had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter." Although twenty years his senior, with a complexion reddened and coarsened by the too liberal use of both paint and strong cordials, yet "to him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary." On leaving Gough Square he lived for a few years in the Temple, where he received his first visit from Boswell, and made the acquaintance of Oliver Goldsmith. The latter was then living at 6, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, where Johnson, visiting him one morning in response to an urgent message, found that "his landlady had arrested him for his rent." He showed Johnson his MS. of the just-completed Vicar of Wakefield, which he looked into, and instantly comprehending its merit, went out and sold it to a bookseller for sixty pounds. In 1765 Johnson returned to Fleet Street, and lived for eleven years at 7, Johnson's Court. Here Boswell dined with him for the first time on Easter Day, 1773, and found to his surprise "everything in very good order." Walking up the Court one day in company with Topham Beauclerk, Boswell confessed to him that he "had a veneration" for it, because the great doctor lived there, and was much gratified to learn that Beauclerk felt the same "reverential enthusiasm." In later years Dickens stole up this Court one dark December evening, and, with beating heart, dropped his first original MS. into the letter-box of The Monthly Magazine, the office of which stood on the site now occupied by Mr. Henry Sell's premises. No. 8, Bolt Court, was the next and last residence of Dr. Johnson; here, on December 13th, 1784, he met the inevitable crisis, for which he had always felt an indescribable terror and loathing, and passed peacefully and happily away. Johnson had always had a great predilection for club or tavern life, partly because it enabled him to escape for a while from the hypochondria which always dogged his footsteps. He loved nothing so much as to gather kindred spirits around him and spend long evenings in congenial conversation. He would sit, "the Jupiter of a little circle, sometimes indeed nodding approbation, but always prompt on the slightest contradiction to launch the thunders of rebuke and sarcasm." There was not much expense attached to these gatherings, for it is recorded of one of the clubs he founded that the outlay was not to exceed sixpence per person an evening, with a fine of twopence for those who did not attend. Among the Fleet Street haunts thus frequently resorted to by Dr. Johnson and his friends were the "Cocke," patronised in former years by Pepys, and in later years by Thackeray, Dickens, and Tennyson; the "Cheshire Cheese," the only house of the kind which remains as it was in Dr. Johnson's day; the "Mitre," also formerly patronised by Pepys; and the "Devil," where the poets laureate had been wont to repair and read their birthday odes. St. Clement Danes, too, is connected with Johnson, for, in spite of his love of festivity, he was devout, and regularly attended this church, occupying pew No. 18 in the north gallery, now marked by a brass plate. Boswell records that "he carried me with him to the church of St. Clement Danes, where he had his seat, and his behaviour was, as I had imagined to myself, solemnly devout."

One more memory of Fleet Street before we leave it, in connection with Dick's Coffee-house, which used to stand at Nos. 7 and 8. In December, 1763, the poet Cowper, then a student in the Inner Temple, was appointed Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords. Delicate, shy, intensely sensitive, and with a strong predisposition to insanity, the dread of these onerous public duties disturbed the balance of his morbid brain. His madness broke out one morning at Dick's, as he himself afterwards narrated. He said:

"At breakfast I read the newspaper, and in it a letter, which the further I perused it the more closely engaged my attention. I cannot now recollect the purport of it; but before I had finished it, it appeared demonstratively true to me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author appeared to be acquainted with my purpose of self-destruction, and to have written that letter on purpose to secure and hasten the execution of it. My mind probably at this time began to be disordered; however it was, I was certainly given to a strong delusion. I said within myself, 'Your cruelty shall be gratified, you shall have your revenge,' and flinging down the paper in a fit of strong passion, I rushed hastily out of the room, directing my way towards the fields, where I intended to find some lane to die in, or if not, determined to poison myself in a ditch, when I could meet with one sufficiently retired."