“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.”