"'I should like,' said Mr. Reynolds, 'to have seen Pope talking with Patty Blount, and I have seen Goldsmith.' Everyone turned round to look at Mr. Reynolds, as if by so doing they too could get a sight of Goldsmith....
"Erasmus Phillips, who was deep in a game of piquet at the other end of the room, whispered to Martin Burney to ask if Junius would not be a fit person to invoke from the dead. 'Yes,' said Lamb, 'provided he would agree to lay aside his mask.'
"We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding was mentioned as a candidate. Only one, however, seconded the proposition. 'Richardson?' 'By all means; but only to look at him through the glass-door of his back-shop, hard at work upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary contrast that ever was presented between an author and his works), but not to let him come behind his counter, lest he should want you to turn customer; nor to go upstairs with him, lest he should offer to read the first manuscript of "Sir Charles Grandison," which was originally written in twenty-eight volumes octavo; or get out the letters of his female correspondents to prove that "Joseph Andrews" was low.'
"There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any one expressed the least desire to see—Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face and wily policy—and one enthusiast, John Bunyan, the immortal author of 'The Pilgrim's Progress.'....
"Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received with the greatest enthusiasm. He presently superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on condition that he should sit in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the farce,—Lear and Wildair, and Abel Drugger....
"Lamb inquired if there was any one that was hanged that I would choose to mention, and I answered, 'Eugene Aram.'"
The present Hare Place was the once disreputable Ram Alley, the scene of a comedy of that name, written by Lodowick Barry and dramatised in the reign of James I.; the plot Killigrew afterwards used in his vulgar Parson's Wedding. Barry, an Irishman, of whom nothing much is known, makes one of his roystering characters say,—
"And rough Ram Alley stinks with cooks' shops vile;
Yet, stay, there's many a worthy lawyer's chamber
'Buts upon Ram Alley."
As a precinct of Whitefriars, Ram Alley enjoyed the mischievous privilege of sanctuary for murderers, thieves, and debtors—indeed, any class of rascals except traitors—till the fifteenth century. After this it sheltered only debtors. Barry speaks of its cooks, salesmen, and laundresses; and Shadwell classes it (Charles II.) with Pye Corner, as the resort of "rascally stuff." Lord Clarendon, in his autobiography, describes the Great Fire as burning on the Thames side as far as the "new buildings of the Inner Temple next to Whitefriars," striking next on some of the buildings which joined to Ram Alley, and sweeping all those into Fleet Street. In the reign of George I. Ram Alley was full of public-houses, and was a place of no reputation, having passages into the Temple and Serjeants' Inn. "A kind of privileged place for debtors," adds Hatton, "before the late Act of Parliament (9 & 10 William III. c. 17, s. 15) for taking them away." This useful Act swept out all the London sanctuaries, those vicious relics of monastic rights, including Mitre Court, Salisbury Court (Fleet Street), the Savoy, Fulwood Rents (Holborn), Baldwin's Gardens (Gray's Inn Lane), the Minories, Deadman's Place, Montague Close (Southwark), the Clink, and the Mint in the same locality. The Savoy and the Mint, however, remained disreputable a generation or two later.
Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street, now deserted by the faithless Serjeants, is supposed to have been given to the Dean and Chapter of York in 1409 (Henry IV.) It then consisted of shops, &c. In 1627 (Charles I.) the inn began its legal career by being leased for forty years to nine judges and fifteen serjeants. In this hall, in 1629, the judges in full bench struck a sturdy blow at feudal privileges by agreeing that peers might be attached upon process for contempt out of Chancery. In 1723 (George I.) the inn was highly aristocratic, its inmates being the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Baron, justices, and Serjeants. In 1730, however, the fickle serjeants removed to Chancery Lane, and Adam, the architect of the Adelphi, designed the present nineteen houses and the present street frontage. On the site of the hall arose the Amicable Assurance Society, which in 1865 transferred its business to the Economic, and the house is now the Norwich Union Office. The inn is a parish in itself, making its own assessment, and contributing to the City rates. Its pavement, which had been part of the stone-work of Old St. Paul's, was not replaced till 1860. The conservative old inn retained its old oil lamps long after the introduction of gas.