MRS. SALMON'S WAXWORK, FLEET STREET—"PALACE OF HENRY VIII. AND CARDINAL WOLSEY"
That shameless rogue, Edmund Curll, lived at the "Dial and Bible," against St. Dunstan's Church. When this clever rascal was put in the pillory at Charing Cross, he persuaded the mob he was in for a political offence, and so secured the pity of the crowd. The author of "John Buncle" describes Curll as a tall, thin, awkward man, with goggle eyes, splay feet, and knock-knees. His translators lay three in a bed at the "Pewter Platter Inn" at Holborn. He published the most disgraceful books and forged letters. Curll, in his revengeful spite, accused Pope of pouring an emetic into his half-pint of canary when he and Curll and Lintot met by appointment at the "Swan Tavern," Fleet Street. By St. Dunstan's, at the "Homer's Head," also lived the publisher of the first correct edition of "The Dunciad."
ST. DUNSTAN'S CLOCK
Among the booksellers who crowded round old St. Dunstan's were Thomas Marsh, of the "Prince's Arms," who printed Stow's "Chronicles;" and William Griffith, of the "Falcon," in St. Dunstan's Churchyard, who, in the year 1565, issued, without the authors' consent, Gorboduc, written by Thomas Norton and Lord Buckhurst, the first real English tragedy and the first play written in English blank verse. John Smethwicke, a still more honoured name, "under the diall" of St. Dunstan's Church, published "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet." Richard Marriot, another St. Dunstan's bookseller, published Quarle's "Emblems," Dr. Donne's "Sermons," that delightful, simple-hearted book, Isaak Walton's "Complete Angler," and Butler's "Hudibras," that wonderful mass of puns and quibbles, pressed close as potted meat. Matthias Walker, a St. Dunstan's bookseller, was one of the three timid publishers who ventured on a certain poem, called "The Paradise Lost," giving John Milton, the blind poet, the enormous sum of £5 down, £5 on the sale of 1,300 copies of the first, second, and third impressions, in all the munificent recompense of £20; the agreement was given to the British Museum in 1852, by Samuel Rogers, the banker poet.
Nor in this list of Fleet Street printers must we forget to insert Richard Pynson, from Normandy, who had worked at Caxton's press, and was a contemporary of De Worde. According to Mr. Noble (to whose work we are so deeply indebted), Pynson printed in Fleet Street, at his office, the "George" (first in the Strand, and afterwards beside St. Dunstan's Church), no less than 215 works. The first of these, completed in the year 1483, was probably the first book printed in Fleet Street, afterwards a gathering-place for the ink-stained craft. A copy of this book, "Dives and Pauper," was sold a few years since for no less than £49. In 1497 the same busy Frenchman published an edition of "Terence," the first Latin classic printed in England. In 1508 he became printer to King Henry VII., and after this produced editions of Fabyan's and Froissart's "Chronicles." He seems to have had a bitter feud with a rival printer, named Robert Rudman, who pirated his trade-mark. In one of his books he thus quaintly falls foul of the enemy: "But truly Rudeman, because he is the rudest out of a thousand men.... Truly I wonder now at last that he hath confessed it in his own typography, unless it chanced that even as the devil made a cobbler a mariner, he made him a printer. Formerly this scoundrel did prefer himself a bookseller, as well skilled as if he had started forth from Utopia. He knows well that he is free who pretendeth to books, although it be nothing more."
To this brief chronicle of early Fleet Street printers let us add Richard Bancks, who, in 1600, at his office, "the sign of the White Hart," printed that exquisite fairy poem, Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream." How one envies the "reader" of that office, the compositors—nay, even the sable imp who pulled the proof, and snatched a passage or two about Mustard and Pease Blossom in a surreptitious glance! Another great Fleet Street printer was Richard Grafton, the printer, as Mr. Noble says, of the first correct folio English translation of the Bible, by permission of Henry VIII. When in Paris, Grafton had to fly with his books from the Inquisition. After his patron Cromwell's execution, in 1540, Grafton was sent to the Fleet for printing Bibles, but in the happier times of Edward VI. he became king's printer at the Grey Friars (now Christ's Hospital). His former fellow-worker in Paris, Edward Whitchurch, set up his press at De Worde's old house, the "Sun," near the Fleet Street conduit. He published the "Paraphrase of Erasmus," a copy of which, Mr. Noble says, existed, with its desk-chains, in the vestry of St. Benet's, Gracechurch Street. Whitchurch married the widow of Archbishop Cranmer.
The "Hercules Pillars" (now No. 27, Fleet Street, south) was a celebrated tavern as early as the reign of James I., and in the now nameless alley by its side several houses of entertainment nestled themselves. The tavern is interesting to us chiefly because it was a favourite resort of Pepys, who frequently mentions it in his quaint and graphic way.