“The Cock, most ancient of taverns, has followed its ‘plump head-waiter’ along the road of mortality, although, fortunately, its fittings and furniture are still preserved with the house which, under the same name, has risen on the other side of the street. The Old Cheshire Cheese stands as it stood in the days when Goldsmith used to pass its side door on his way up the dark entry to his lodgings in Wine Office Court. The jolly host who owns the freehold can show title-deeds going back almost to the time of the Great Fire of London.

“There, on the ground floor, we meet our ‘Prior’ sitting on a bench, above which is set in the wall a brass tablet bearing the following inscription:—

“‘The Favourite Seat of
Dr. SAMUEL JOHNSON.
Born September 18, 1709; Died December 13, 1784.

“‘In him a noble understanding and a masterly intellect were united to great 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.’

“In this same room, with its floor as ‘nicely sanded’ as when Goldsmith knew it, our club gathers from time to time; here, undisturbed in our thoughts by a single modern innovation except the gas, we sup on one of those beefsteak puddings for which the Cheshire Cheese has been famous from time immemorial. So vast is it in all its glorious rotundity that it has to be wheeled in on a table; it disdains a successor in the same line, and itself alone satisfies forty hungry guests. ‘A magnificent hot apple pie stuck with bay leaves,’ our second course, recalls the supper with which Johnson ‘celebrated the birth of the first literary child of Mrs. Lennox, the novelist, when at five in the morning his face still shone with meridian splendour though his drink had been only lemonade.’[4] The talk is of the liveliest; from time to time toasts are drunk and responded to.”

The centenary of the death of Dr. Johnson was celebrated in December, 1884, and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of the 20th of that month thus refers to the Doctor’s connection with the ancient hostelry:—“Whoever has heard of the grand old Doctor knows well that the greater part of his life was passed between Ludgate Hill and Temple Bar, and that the most interesting portion of it revolved about Gough Square. There seems to be little doubt that while he lived here, the Old Cheshire Cheese tavern was, as is claimed for it, the haunt which he most favoured, and where much of that sledgehammer wisdom was coaxed forth or teased forth, which Boswell has recorded that, as Macaulay put it, the memory of Johnson might keep alive the fame of his works.”

Many notable men have sat down at the Johnson centenary dinners in the Cheshire Cheese. At that held on December 13, 1894, for example, the chair was taken by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., M.P., then most popularly known as the author of “Obiter Dicta,” but subsequently to become President of the Board of Education and later Chief Secretary for Ireland in a Liberal Government. From the Sketch of December 19, which devoted to this particular festivity a page and half of illustrated literary matter, is taken the following extract:—“The most interesting figure of the evening was undoubtedly Mr. Dobson. His health was proposed just in such a way as it must have been in the days when men of letters indited odes to one another.” Then followed the reading of gentle imitations of Mr. Dobson’s style, but exigency of space precludes our quoting more than a couple of stanzas from a delightful perversion of “The Ladies of St. James’s”:—

The Journalists of Fleet Street

Have precious little cash,