the houses, that, from the region of the Alhambra, then Leicester Fields, the heads of the rebels of 1745 could be seen on Temple Bar, and Queen's Square, Bloomsbury, was left open on the north side till after Johnson's death, that a fair country prospect might be enjoyed. Grosvenor Square was built after Boswell knew Johnson; and Portman Square was not finished till about the year of Johnson's death. It also had a fine open prospect to the north.

Those suburbs to which, as Lord Rosebery says, men carry home their fish for dinner in a basket, were hardly known. Merchants generally lived in the city, as they are represented rather later in Jane Austen's novels; lawyers dwelt in or around the Inns of Court; and actors near the two Theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane.

Yet even the London of those days did not escape the eternal flux of things. Covent Garden and Soho were ceasing to be fashionable, and Mayfair was becoming too small for the aristocracy. Up to the middle of the century they found room east of Hyde Park. Now they begin to migrate to the west of it. Improvement schemes have swept away many streets and buildings, and done much to alter London.

The bad quality of the bricks, notorious so long ago as the time of Charles II., has also helped to play havoc with the buildings of Johnson's London. Fire has consumed the House of Commons where he reported, or invented, the debates; and the Drury Lane Theatre, where, in 1749, his play "Irene" was damned whilst he "felt like the Monument."

From Charing Cross to Whitechapel, where, as Johnson told Goldsmith, there was "the greatest series of shops in the world," little remains of eighteenth-century London. His church, St. Clement Danes, "sedate and mannered elegance," as Mr. Henley calls it, St. Paul's Cathedral, part of the Bank of England,【Clerkenwell Gate, the Tower, the Mansion House, and a few churches, are the chief buildings on which Johnson looked and we can look also. But who shall find the house of the Dillys, those hospitable booksellers in the Poultry, who dared to entertain Johnson with Wilkes? Where now is the local habitation of the Cock Lane Ghost? And many of Johnson's own dwelling-places, his friends' houses, and his places of amusement, have gone, or cannot be identified. It is true that his residence in Gough Square stands, but where are those of Woodstock Street, or Castle Street, or Staple Inn? We shall look in vain for his chambers in the Inner Temple Lane, where, in Boswell's time, he lived in "poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature,"

talked as "correctly as a second edition," and received Madame de Boufflers with such a polite air. The house in Bolt Court, where the elder Disraeli left his MSS., and where Samuel Rogers knocked and ran away, was destroyed soon after Johnson's death. His taverns, which were his clubs, have also generally vanished. Some, such as the "Cheshire Cheese," and the "Cock," of Tennyson's Poem, were probably visited by him, but they have only traditional connection with Johnson's name. There were, however, others to which he undoubtedly went.

The "Pine Apple," near St. Martin's Lane, where he dined, as an abstainer, for sevenpence, and gave the waiter a penny; the" King's Head," in Ivy Lane, where one of his earliest clubs was founded, in 1748, and the "Turk's Head," Soho, where, in 1763, The Club was founded-these have all gone. Sadder is the loss of "The Devil Tavern," which stood between the Temple Gate and Temple Bar. It was the old tavern of Ben Jonson. There he gathered his "boys," drank seas of "canary," and received those who desired to be "sealed of the tribe of Ben." There, too, Swift and Addison were treated to a dinner by Dr. Garth, and there Johnson, in 1751, gave that supper to Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, and nearly twenty other friends, to celebrate the birthday of the lady's first novel. At 8 P.M. they began, and at near 8 A.M. they broke up. Meanwhile, as they remembered, there had been a hot apple pie, stuck with bay leaves, and during the last three hours Johnson's face had "shone with meridian splendour," though his drink had been "only lemonade." Lemonade must have been purer then.

Since the taverns and coffee-houses in and out of Fleet Street were numerous-and Leigh Hunt is, no doubt, correct in declaring that Johnson was in every one of them-it would, perhaps, be unreasonable to expect them all still to be standing, in these days of temperance and County Councils. But the "Mitre "? Must the "Mitre" go, and the gaiety of London be eclipsed? Yes, the "Mitre," not that in Mitre Court, but the true and original "Mitre" in Fleet Street, "the orthodox high church sound of the Mitre," as Boswell said, was not safe from what Johnson, mourning over the loss of Tyburn, called the "fury of innovation.' The "Mitre" had existed at least from the early part of the seventeenth century, and Johnson was happily spared by death the sight of its approaching abolition in 1788. It would be difficult to exhaust the great subject of Johnson and the "Mitre." His visits were apparently notorious, for within a month after Boswell first met Johnson, Boswell knew that the "Mitre " was Johnson's frequent resort. How Boswell proposed a visit there, and how they supped well, discussed

poetry, religion, ghosts, and Boswell's private affairs, and drank two bottles of port, and how they sat till between one and two in the morning is it not all written in the best biography in the world? Although Johnson dropped the port, and degenerated to water or lemonade, he and Boswell often went again to "keep up the custom of the Mitre'"; and, in truth, Johnson had been there before. "Come," said he, "you pretty fools," to the two young women from Staffordshire who consulted him on the subject of Methodism— "Come, you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the 'Mitre,' and we will talk over that subject:" and they did. But perhaps

we had better leave the "Mitre."

We can see Johnson, on some more decorous day, walking along Fleet Street. It must not be in early life, or early morning. In early life Johnson endured "the patron and the jail," and early morning he rarely saw, unless it was very early morning. He found, as we do now, that in London "the day does not go with the sun"; and Johnson, unless obliged by work, or tempted by Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," did not rise till noon. It should not be late, for the dark and ill-paved streets are not too safe, and had not Johnson been himself attacked? Let it be after his morning bedroom reception. He dresses in an untidy bushy grey wig, a plain brown suit, black worsted stockings, and shoes with silver buckles--the buckles and wigs just survived him.

The sedan chairs and the coaches, the ballad singers, the street cries, the street signs, so serviceable for chairmen and porters who could not read numbers, the men as well as the women wearing coloured clothes, the clergy and physicians in their gowns, all make the streets lively. Even later Charles Lamb could say, "I often shed tears in the motley Strand for fulness of joy at so much life." Johnson rolls through it in that strange way which made people stare. It is daytime, and he does not laugh so as to be heard at the other end of Fleet Street. But he goes along talking to himself, and tapping posts, or mysteriously picking up orange peel. His sight is bad; but, as Goldsmith's story proves, he sees the heads on the top of Temple Bar. Johnson passes Butchers Row, where Guy Fawkes had met his fellow-conspirators, and where the Law Courts now stand. He passes Clements Inn and Clifton's eating-house, which he sometimes used; he passes Essex Street, where, at the "Essex Head,” he was to establish his last Club. He may call at a house which was afterwards the first London residence of George Eliot, and was in Johnson's day called the "Turk's Head." It was at the corner of Catherine Street. 66 'I encourage this house," said Johnson, "for the VOL. CCLXXIV. NO. 1946.

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mistress of it is a good civil woman and has not much business." He passes Exeter Street, where he first lodged and lived upon fourpence-halfpenny a day, and the shop of the good bookseller Wilcockes, of whom he and Garrick had in those early days borrowed a five-pound note; and so to Exeter Change, where for half a crown Pidcock showed lions and tigers, whose roars frightened the passing horses. Thence to the "Fountain Tavern," where Johnson read "Irene" to Peter Garrick, and where "Simpson's" now stands. Then came Northumberland House, the northern front of which was twice rebuilt in Johnson's time; and finally Charing Cross. It was then a narrow place without Trafalgar Square, but there, as we all well know, he found the "full tide of human existence." If Johnson had turned off before he reached Charing Cross, be sure it was to Garrick's new house in the Adelphi, or to Dr. Burney's near St. Martin's Lane; or perhaps to visit either Tom's Coffee House, or Wills, or the shop of Davies the bookseller, who had the famous "pretty wife," and introduced Boswell to Johnson. Or Johnson proceeding, might reach more distant haunts beyond Charing Cross-say the "British Coffee House" in Cockspur Street, or Dodsley's, the bookseller's shop, in Pall Mall, or he would cross Leicester Fields to Reynolds's house; or push further west to St. James's Square, where, in lack of a lodging, he and Savage had, in earlier years, walked round all night and sworn to stand by their country.

If Johnson desire to return another way, he has to cross the river or return by boat.

Luckily, old Westminster Bridge, the bridge upon which Wordsworth wrote his famous sonnet, had been opened in 1750. But, if the walk be before 1768, there is no crossing at Blackfriars, where Daniel Deronda was to meet the waiting Mordecai.

The river is pleasant and safe, except in shooting London Bridge. There are at Hungerford, or the Temple Stairs, many small boats rowed by jolly young watermen in red stockings. Johnson is used to this mode of conveyance. He had gone with Boswell more than once on the Thames. But one practice, which time has not spared, but which was at least as old as Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley, startles us. People passing on the river abuse each other, and are, if possible, satirical. Now, although Mr. Burke afterwards admired it, should we not have been shocked to hear Johnson, the great lexicographer, the stern moralist, reply, as he did from his boat, to some ribaldry, by exclaiming, "Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods"? Johnson, on this occasion, may be considered to return by the Temple Stairs, and that early;

but this is really most unusual. Sometimes he would dine or drink tea with Mrs. Williams, the head of his odd charitable house; but he seldom came home till two in the morning. Let us hope he had come back earlier on that memorable night when at 3 A.M. Beauclerk and Langton knocked him up for a "frisk."

We have not time to see Johnson at the houses of his friends or acquaintances, or at his clubs. "Round the town," is of course in public places. Now, London at that time had few theatres; but it had many spas and tea gardens, and such places of recreation. Johnson, like a philosopher, defended their existence, and, like a wise man, went to them. "Sir, I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep people from vice." There are many recorded instances of Johnson's visits to public places. At Marylebone Gardens, when there was an attempt to cheat him and others of the fireworks, I regret to find that he seems to have aided and abetted in a riot. But Vauxhall and Ranelagh were the chief public places of an age when responsibility for the universe had not been invented, and man dared to give his soul a loose.

I wish I could show you Johnson at Vauxhall Gardens, which witnessed the gaiety of seven generations, and were in their prime in Johnson's day. Boswell refers to and praises them. He rightly foresaw a long future for Vauxhall, so "peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation." Mr. Austin Dobson has described Vauxhall for us. In Johnson's day Goldsmith and Horace Walpole, Fielding and Smollett, all refer to this place, with walks "so intricate that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters"; and it endured to be again described by Thackeray. Johnson must, of course, have been there. Rowlandson represents him in a picture as supping at Vauxhall. But, alas! there is no record of a visit. As to the other famous place, Ranelagh, he knew it well. Ranelagh was a public garden at Chelsea, opened at a cost of more than £12,000 in 1742, when Johnson was busy giving the "Whig dogs" the worst of it in his parliamentary debates. Ranelagh lasted till twenty years after Johnson's death. It was the predecessor of "Venice in London." The admission was usually one shilling. There were to be found a rotunda and a lake, and a Venetian pavilion, and also trees and alleys, and boxes for refreshments. It was called by Horace Walpole "an immense amphitheatre full of little ale houses." There were public suppers and concerts. It was at first very fashionable, and Lord Chesterfield said he had "ordered all his letters to be directed thither." It must once have been a merry, yet proper place; for the ex