FLEET STREET (continued)
The "Green Dragon"—Tompion and Pinchbeck—The Record—St. Bride's and its Memories—Punch and his Contributors—The Dispatch—The Daily Telegraph—The "Globe Tavern" and Goldsmith—The Morning Advertiser—The Standard—The London Magazine—A Strange Story—Alderman Waithman—Brutus Billy—Hardham and his "37."
The original "Green Dragon" (No. 56, south) was destroyed by the Great Fire, and the new building set six feet backward. During the Popish Plot several anti-papal clubs met here; and from the windows Roger North stood to see the shouting, torch-waving procession pass along, to burn the Pope's effigy at Temple Bar. In the "Discussion Forum" many Lord Chancellors of the future have tried their eloquence. It was celebrated some years ago from an allusion to it made by Napoleon III.
At No. 67 (corner of Whitefriars Street) once lived that famous watchmaker of Queen Anne's reign, Thomas Tompion, who is said, in 1700, to have begun a clock for St. Paul's Cathedral which was to go one hundred years without winding up. He died in 1713. His apprentice, George Graham, invented, as Mr. Noble tells us, the horizontal escapement, in 1724. He was succeeded by Mudge and Dutton, who, in 1768, made Dr. Johnson his first watch. The old shop was (1850) one of the last in Fleet Street to be modernised.
Between Bolt and Johnson's courts (152-166, north)—say near "Anderton's Hotel"—there lived, in the reign of George II., at the sign of the "Astronomer's Musical Clock," Christopher Pinchbeck, an ingenious musical-clockmaker, who invented the "cheap and useful imitation of gold," which still bears his name. (Watt's, in his "Dictionary of Chemistry," says "pinchbeck" is an alloy of copper and zinc, usually containing about nine parts copper to one part zinc. Brandt says it is an alloy containing more copper than exists in brass, and consequently made by fusing various proportions of copper with brass.) Pinchbeck often exhibited his musical automata in a booth at Bartholomew Fair, and, in conjunction with Fawkes the Conjuror, at Southwark Fair. He made, according to Mr. Wood, an exquisite musical clock, worth about £500, for Louis XIV., and a fine organ for the Great Mogul, valued at £300. He died in 1732. He removed to Fleet Street (between Bolt and Johnson's courts, north side) from Clerkenwell in 1721. His clocks played tunes and imitated the notes of birds. In 1765 he set up, at the Queen's House, a clock with four faces, showing the age of the moon, the day of the week and month, the time of sun rising, &c.
No. 161 (north) was the shop of Thomas Hardy, that agitating bootmaker, secretary to the London Corresponding Society, who was implicated in the John Horne Tooke trials of 1794; and next door, years after (No. 162), Richard Carlisle, a "freethinker," opened a lecturing, conversation, and discussion establishment, preached the "only true gospel," hung effigies of bishops outside his shop, and was eventually quieted by nine years' imprisonment, a punishment by no means undeserved. No. 76 (south) was once the entrance to the printing-office of Samuel Richardson, the author of "Clarissa," who afterwards lived in Salisbury Square, and there held levees of his admirers, to whom he read his works with an innocent vanity which occasionally met with disagreeable rebuffs.
"Anderton's Hotel" (No. 164, north side) occupies the site of a house given, as Mr. Noble says, in 1405, to the Goldsmiths' Company, under the singular title of "The Horn in the Hoop," probably at that time a tavern. In the register of St. Dunstan's is an entry (1597), "Ralph slaine at the Horne, buryed," but no further record exists of this hot-headed roysterer. In the reign of King James I. the "Horn" is described as "between the 'Red Lion,' over against Serjeants' Inn, and Three-legged Alley."
AN EVENING WITH DR. JOHNSON AT THE "MITRE"