“There is a collection of useful
IMPLEMENTS OF INEBRIETY
in the bar of the Cheshire Cheese, which brings the place’s past more vividly, perhaps, before one than any view of its sanded floors, low ceilings, or quaint staircase, disappearing suddenly from the entrance passage in formal but inviting bend.
“Voltaire was certainly here; Bolingbroke, in this place cracked many a bottle of Burgundy; and Congreve’s wit flashed wine-inspired, while Pope, sickly and intolerant of tobacco-smoke, suffered under these low roofs I doubt not many a headache. But it is of its distinguished visitors of later days that the Cheshire Cheese as it now stands reminds one most fully. Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Chatterton were undoubted frequenters. Many a time the great Samuel, turning heavily in his accustomed seat, and beset by some pert sailing pinnace, brought, like a galleon manœuvring, his ponderous artillery to bear. Goldsmith lived at No. 6 Wine Office Court, where he wrote or partly wrote the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ his flagging inspiration possibly gaining assistance from the tavern’s famed Madeira.
“His (Dr. Johnson’s) frequent, nay, nightly visits here are matters of history, and have been vouched for on
AUTHORITY BEYOND DISPUTE.
The time is not so far distant when old frequenters to the house were to be found who had drunk and eaten with men whom Johnson had conversationally annihilated, and who recalled the circumstance with an extreme clearness of recollection. A recollection this which joined the record of two generations of the tavern’s great visitors. And the second generation offered names not unworthy to compare with the first, such notabilities as these figuring in the list: Dickens, Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, John Forster, Sir Alexander Cockburn, Professor Aytoun, Tom Hood, Andrew Halliday, and Charles Mathews.”
Miss Sarah Morton, a special correspondent of the Illustrated Buffalo Express (N.Y.), gives in her paper, February 15, 1891, an amusing report of her visit to the “Cheese.” “It was,” she says, “with slow and lingering steps that I emerged from a visit to the ghastly yet fascinating Tower of London, by the way of old St. Paul’s Churchyard into Fleet Street, towards the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’ ’Twas the night of the beefsteak pudding, a delicacy served only twice a week, and in precisely the same way that it has been served in this very place for 200 years.
“One feels just like sidling into an old-fashioned church pew, for the three tables on the left, each accommodating six persons, are provided with high-backed benches black with age.