† Many of these relics have since been disposed in a different way.—Raleigh was incarcerated in various parts of the Tower, in the course of his several imprisonments.
CHAPTER IV
RAMBLES IN LONDON
All old cities get rich in association, as a matter of course and whether they will or no; but London, by reason of its great extent, as well as its great antiquity, is richer in association than any modern place on earth. The stranger scarcely takes a step without encountering a new object of interest. The walk along the Strand and Fleet Street, in particular, is continually on storied ground. Old Temple Bar still stands (July 1877), though "tottering to its fall," and marks the junction of the two streets. The statues of Charles the First and Charles the Second on its western front would be remarkable anywhere, as characteristic portraits. You stand beside that arch and quite forget the passing throng, and take no heed of the tumult around, as you think of Johnson and Boswell leaning against the Bar after midnight in the far-off times and waking the echoes of the Temple Garden with their frolicsome laughter. The Bar is carefully propped now, and they will nurse its age as long as they can; but it is an obstruction to travel—and it must disappear. (It was removed in the summer of 1878.) They will probably set it up, newly built, in another place. They have left untouched a little piece of the original scaffolding built around St. Paul's; and that fragment of decaying wood may still be seen, high upon the side of the cathedral. The Rainbow, the Mitre, the Cheshire Cheese, Dolly's Chop-House, the Cock, and the Round Table—taverns or public-houses that were frequented by the old wits—are still extant (1877). The Cheshire Cheese is scarcely changed from what it was when Johnson, Goldsmith, and their comrades ate beefsteak pie and drank porter there, and the Doctor "tossed and gored several persons," as it was his cheerful custom to do. The benches in that room are narrow, incommodious, penitential; mere ledges of well-worn wood, on which the visitor sits bolt upright, in difficult perpendicular; but there is, probably, nothing on earth that would induce the owner to alter them—and he is right.