have been on their knees in their own far-away | barrister friend by a noisy illumination-night crowd. Gloucestershire abbey, history does not choose to record. The sign of their inn was the "Poppingaye" (popinjay, parrot), and in 1602 (last year of Elizabeth) the alley was called Poppingay Alley. That excellent man Van Mildert (then a poor curate, living in Ely Place, afterwards Bishop of Durham—a prelate remarkable for this above all his many other Christian virtues, that he was not proud) was once driven into this alley with a young The street boys began firing a volley of squibs at the young curate, who found all hope of escape barred, and dreaded the pickpockets, who take rapid advantage of such temporary embarrassments; but his good-natured exclamation, "Ah! here you are, popping away in Poppin's Court!" so pleased the crowd that they at once laughingly opened a passage for him. "Sic me servavit Apollo," he used afterwards to add when telling the story. CHAPTER XII. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES-SOUTH. Worthy Mr. Fisher-Lamb's Wednesday Evenings-Persons one would wish to have seen-Ram Alley-Serjeants' Inn-The Daily NewsMemory" Woodfall-A Mug-House Riot-Richardson's Printing Office-Fielding and Richardson-Johnson's Estimate of RichardsonHogarth and Richardson's Guest-An Egotist Rebuked-The King's "Housewife "-Caleb Colton: his Life, Works, and Sentiments. His FALCON COURT, Fleet Street, took its name from an inn which bore the sign of the "Falcon." This passage formerly belonged to a gentleman named Fisher, who, out of gratitude to the Cordwainers' Company, bequeathed it to them by will. gratitude is commonly said to have arisen from the number of good dinners that the Company had given him. However this may be, the Cordwainers are the present owners of the estate, and are under the obligation of having a sermon preached annually at the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan, on the 10th of July, when certain sums are given to the poor. Formerly it was the custom to drink sack in the church to the pious memory of Mr. Fisher, but this appears to have been discontinued for a considerable period. This Fisher was a jolly fellow, if all the tales are true which are related of him, as, besides the sack-drinking, he stipulated that the Cordwainers should give a grand feast on the same day yearly to all their tenants. What a quaint picture might be made of the churchwardens in the old church drinking to the memory of Mr. Fisher! Wynkyn de Worde, the father of printing in England, lived in Fleet Street, at his messuage or inn known by the sign of the Falcon. Whether it was the inn that stood on the site of Falcon Court is not known with certainty, but most probably it was. Charles Lamb came to 16, Mitre Court Buildings in 1800, after leaving Southampton Buildings, and remained in that quiet harbour out of Fleet Street till 1809, when he removed to Inner Temple Lane. It was whilst Lamb was residing in Mitre Court Buildings that those Wednesday evenings of his were in their glory. In two of Mr. Hazlitt's papers are graphic pictures of these delightful Wednesdays and the Wednesday men, and admirable notes of several choice conversations. There is a curious sketch in one of a little tilt between Coleridge and Holcroft, which must not be omitted. "Coleridge was riding the high German horse, and demonstrating the Categories of the Transcendental Philosophy' to the author of The Road to Ruin, who insisted on his knowledge of German and German metaphysics, having read the Critique of Pure Reason' in the original. My dear Mr. Holcroft,' said Coleridge, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, 'you really put me in mind of a sweet pretty German girl of about fifteen, in the Hartz Forest, in Germany, and who one day, as I was reading "The Limits of the Knowable and the Unknowable," the profoundest of all his works, with great attention, came behind my chair, and leaning over, said, "What! you read Kant? Why, I, that am a German born, don't understand him!" This was too much to bear, and Holcroft, starting up, called out, in no measured tone, 'Mr. Coleridge, you are the most eloquent man I ever met with, and the most troublesome with your eloquence.' Phillips held the cribbagepeg, that was to mark the game, suspended in his hand, and the whist-table was silent for a moment. and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with I saw Holcroft downstairs, and on coming to the them. At this Ayrton laughed outright, and conlanding-place in Mitre Court he stopped me to ceived Lamb was jesting with him; but as no one observe that he thought Mr. Coleridge a very followed his example he thought there might be clever man, with a great command of language, something in it, and waited for an explanation in but that he feared he did not always affix very a state of whimsical suspense. proper ideas to the words he used. After he was gone we had our laugh out, and went on with the argument on The Nature of Reason, the Imagination, and the Will.' . . . . It would make a supplement to the 'Biographia Literaria,' in a volume and a half, octavo." It was at one of these Wednesdays that Lamb started his famous question as to persons "one would wish to have seen." It was a suggestive topic, and proved a fruitful one. Mr. Hazlitt, who was there, has left an account behind him of the kind of talk which arose out of this hint, so lightly thrown out by the author of "Elia," and it is worth giving in his own words :— "On the question being started, Ayrton said, 'I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Locke?' In this Ayrton, as usual, reckoned without his host. Every one burst out a-laughing at the expression of Lamb's face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. "Y-yes, the greatest names,' he stammered out hastily; 'but they were not persons -not persons.' 'Not persons?' said Ayrton, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. 'That is,' rejoined Lamb, 'not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton you mean the "Essay on the Human Understanding" and "Principia," which we have to this day. Beyond their contents, there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily for is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller's portraits of them; but who could paint Shakespeare?' 'Ay,' retorted Ayrton, 'there it is. Then I suppose you would prefer seeing him and Milton instead?' 'No,' said Lamb, ' neither; I have seen so much of Shakespeare on the stage.'. . . . 'I shall guess no more,' said Ayrton. Who is it, then, you would like to see "in his habit as he lived," if you had your choice of the whole range of English literature ?' Lamb then named Sir Thomas Brown and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their night-gowns "When Lamb had given his explanation, some one inquired of him if he could not see from the window the Temple walk in which Chaucer used to take his exercise, and on his name being put to the vote I was pleased to find there was a general sensation in his favour in all but Ayrton, who said something about the ruggedness of the metre, and even objected to the quaintness of the orthography.. "Captain Burney muttered something about Columbus, and Martin Burney hinted at the Wandering Jew; but the last was set aside as spurious, and the first made over to the New World. "I should like,' said Mr. Reynolds, to have seen Pope talking with Patty Blount, and I have seen Goldsmith.' Every one 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; Barry leges by agreeing that peers might be attached As a precinct of Whitefriars, Ram Alley en- The arms of Serjeants' Inn, worked into the joyed the mischievous privilege of sanctuary for iron gate opening on Fleet Street, are a dove and a murderers, thieves, and debtors-indeed, any class serpent, the serpent twisted into a kind of true of rascals except traitors-till the fifteenth century. lover's knot. The lawyers of Serjeants' Inn, no After this it sheltered only debtors. doubt, unite the wisdom of the serpent with the speaks of its cooks, salesmen, and laundresses; guilelessness of the dove. Singularly enough Dr. and Shadwell classes it (Charles II.) with Pye Dodd, the popular preacher, who was hanged, bore Corner, as the resort of "rascally stuff." Lord arms nearly similar. 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 privi Half way down Bouverie Street, in the centre of old Whitefriars, is the office of the Daily News. The first number of this popular and influential paper appeared on January 21, 1846. The publishers, and part proprietors, were Messrs. Bradbury and Evans; the principal editor was Charles Dickens; the manager was Dickens's father; the second, or assistant editor, Douglas Jerrold; and among the other "leader" writers and contributors were Albany Fonblanque and John Forster, both of the Examiner. acted as Roman correspondent. The musical critic was the late Mr. George Hogarth, Dickens's father-in-law; and the new journal had an “Irish Famine Commissioner" in the person of Mr. R. H. Horne, the poet. Miss Martineau wrote leading articles in the new paper for several years, and Mr. M'Cullagh Torrens was also a recognised contributor. The staff of Parliamentary reporters was said to be the best in London, several having been taken, at advanced salaries, off the Times. "Father Prout" (Mahoney) "The speculative proprietorship," says Mr. Grant, in his "History of the Newspaper Press," was divided into one hundred shares, some of which were held by Sir William Jackson, M.P., Sir Joshua Watkins, and the late Sir Joseph Paxton. Mr. Charles Dickens, as editor, received a salary of £2,000 a year." The early numbers of the paper contained |