CHAPTER IV.

FLEET STREET (continued).

Dr. Johnson in Ambuscade at Temple Bar-The First Child-Dryden and Black Will-Rupert's Jewels-Telson's Bank-The Apollo Club at the "Devil"-"Old Sir Simon the King"-"Mull Sack"-Dr. Johnson's Supper to Mrs. Lennox-Will Waterproof at the "Cock "—The Duel at "Dick's Coffee House"-Lintot's Shop-Pope and Warburton-Lamb and the Albion-The Palace of Cardinal Wolsey-Mrs. Salmon's Waxwork-Isaak Walton-Praed's Bank-Murray and Byron-St. Dunstan's-Fleet Street Printers-Hoare's Bank and the "Golden Bottle"-The Real and Spurious “Mitre"-Hone's Trial-Cobbett's Shop-" Peele's Coffee House."

their hopes or fears, their pleasures or their pains. No. 1-formerly a quiet, grave-looking house, But in the afternoon, when they have all dined, or next to Temple Bar, but now being replaced by composed themselves to pass the day without a a building more worthy of the site is the oldest dinner, their passions have full play, and I can banking-house in London except one. For two perceive one man wondering at the stupidity of the centuries gold has here been shovelled about, and public, by which his new book has been totally reams of bank-notes have been shuffled over by neglected; another cursing the French, who fright practised thumbs. Private banks originated in the away literary curiosity by their threat of an invasion; stormy days before the Civil War, when wealthy

another swearing at his bookseller, who will ad- | citizens, afraid of what might happen, entrusted vance no money without copy; another perusing as he walks his publisher's bill; another murmuring at an unanswerable criticism; another determining to write no more to a generation of barbarians; and another wishing to try once again whether he cannot awaken the drowsy world to a sense of his merit." This extract seems to us to form an admirable companion picture to that in which we have already shown Goldsmith bantering his brother Jacobite, Johnson, as they looked up together at the grim heads on Temple Bar.

their money to their goldsmiths to take care of till the troubles had blown over. In the time of the Stuarts, Francis Child, an industrious apprentice of the old school, married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, a goldsmith, who lived one door west of Temple Bar, and in due time succeeded to his estate and business. In the first London Directory (1677), among the fifty-eight goldsmiths, thirty-eight of whom lived in Lombard Street, "Blanchard & Child," at the "Marygold." Fleet Street, figure conspicuously as "keeping

running cashes." The original Marygold (sometimes mistaken for a rising sun), with the motto, "Ainsi mon ame," gilt upon a green ground, elegantly designed in the French manner, is still to be seen in the bank "shop," and a marigold in full bloom still blossoms on the bank cheques. In the year 1678 it was at Mr. Blanchard's, the goldsmith's, next door to Temple Bar, that Dryden the poet, bruised and angry, deposited £50 as a reward for any one who would discover the bullies

the firm long preserved the dusty books of the unfortunate alderman, who fled to Holland. On the sallow leaves over which the poor alderman once groaned, you can read the items of our sale of Dunkirk to the French, the dishonourable surrender of which drove the nation almost to madness, and hastened the downfall of Lord Clarendon, who was supposed to have built a magnificent house (on the site of Albemarle Street, Piccadilly) with some of the very money. Charles II. himself banked here,

chalance of his nature. Nell Gwynne, Pepys, of the "Diary," and Prince Rupert also had accounts at Child's, and some of these ledgers were hoarded over Temple Bar in that Venetian-looking room, approached by strange prison-like passages, for which chamber Messrs. Child paid the City a rent of £21 a year.

of Lord Rochester who had beaten him in Rose | and drew his thousands with all the careless nonAlley for some scurrilous verses really written by the Earl of Dorset. The advertisement promises, if the discoverer be himself one of the actors, he shall still have the £50, without letting his name be known or receiving the least trouble by any prosecution. Black Will's cudgel was, after all, a clumsy way of making a repartee. In the course of the eighteenth century, the firm was joined by the descendants of Alderman Backwell, who had been nearly ruined by the iniquitous and arbitrary closing of the Exchequer in 1672 by order of Charles II., that needy and unprincipled king; but the worthy alderman lived to retrieve his position. In a quaint oak-panelled room over Temple Bar

When Prince Rupert died at his house in the Barbican, the valuable jewels of the old cavalry soldier, valued at £20,000, were disposed of in a lottery, managed by Mr. Francis Child, the goldsmith; the king himself, who took a half-businesslike, half-boyish interest in the matter, counting the tickets among all the lords and ladies at Whitehall.

In North's "Life of Lord Keeper Guildford," the courtier and lawyer of the reign of Charles II., there is an anecdote that pleasantly connects Child's bank with the fees of the great lawyers who in that evil reign ruled in Chancery Lane :

"The Lord Keeper Guildford's business increased," says his biographer, "even while he was solicitor, to be so much as to have overwhelmed one less dexterous; but when he was made AttorneyGeneral, though his gains by his office were great, they were much greater by his practice, for that flowed in upon him like an orage, enough to overset one that had not an extraordinary readiness in business. His skull-caps, which he wore when he had leisure to observe his constitution, as I touched before, were now destined to lie in a drawer, to receive the money that came in by fees. One had the gold, another the crowns and half-crowns, and another the smaller money. When these vessels were full, they were committed to his friend (the Hon. Roger North), who was constantly near him, to tell out the cash and put it into the bags according to the contents; and so they went to his treasurers, Blanchard & Child, goldsmiths, Temple Bar."

Francis Child, and his daughter married William Praed, the Truro banker, who early in the present century opened a bank at 189, Fleet Street. So, like three strands of a gold chain, the three banking families were welded together. In 1689 Child's bank seems to have for a moment tottered, but was saved by the timely loan of £1,400 proffered by that overbearing woman, the Duchess of Marlborough. Hogarth is said to have made an oil sketch of the scene, which was sold at Hodgson's sale-room in 1834, and has since disappeared.

In Pennant's time (1793) the original goldsmith's shop seems to have still existed in Fleet Street, in connection with this bank. The principal of the firm was the celebrated Countess of Jersey, a former earl having assumed the name of Child on the countess inheriting the estates of her maternal grandfather, Robert Child, Esq., of Osterly Park, Middlesex. A small full-length portrait of this great beauty of George IV.'s court, painted by Lawrence in his elegant but meretricious manner, hung in the first-floor room of the old bank. The last Child died early in this century. In Chapter 1., Book I., of his "Tale of Two Cities," Dickens has sketched Child's bank with quite an Hogarthian force and colour. He has playfully exaggerated the smallness, darkness, and ugliness of the building, of which he describes the partners as so proud; but there is all his usual delightful humour in the description, occasionally passing into caricature:

"Thus it had come to pass that Telson's was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic' obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Telson's down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a showerbath of mud from Fleet Street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing 'the House,' you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a mis-spent life, until the House came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight."

Year by year Sir Francis Child grew in fame and honour. He was alderman, sheriff, Lord Mayor, President of Christ's Hospital, and M.P. for the City, and finally, dying in 1713, full of years, was buried under a grand black marble tomb in Fulham churchyard, and his account closed for ever. The family went on living in the sunshine. Sir Robert, the son of the Sir Francis, was also alderman of his ward; and, on his death, his brother, Sir Francis, succeeded to all his father's dignities, became an East Indian director, and in 1725 received the special thanks of the citizens for promoting a special act for regulating City elections. Another member of this family (Sir Josiah Child) deserves special mention as one of the earliest writers on political economy and a man much in advance of his time. He saw through the old fallacy about the balance of trade, and explained clearly the true causes of the commercial prosperity of the Dutch. He also condemned the practice of each parish paying for its own poor, an evil which all Poor-law reformers have endeavoured to alter. Sir Josiah was at the head of the East India Company, already feeling its way towards the gold and diamonds of India. His brother was Governor of Bombay, and by the marriage of his numerous daughters the rich merchant became allied to several peers and peeresses of England. The grandson of Alderman The noisy "Devil Tavern" (No. 2, Fleet Street) Backwell married a daughter of the second Sir | had stood next the quiet goldsmith's shop ever

In 1788 (George III.) the firm purchased the renowned "Devil Tavern," next door eastward, and upon the site erected a row of houses up a dim court called Child's Place, under which, on its demolition in 1879, some twenty feet below the level of the street, were found a series of stone arches, which had probably once formed part of an ancient chapel.

The later rules forbid the discussion of serious and sacred subjects. No itinerant fiddlers (who then, as now, frequented taverns) were to be allowed to obtrude themselves. The feasts were to be cele

songs, and the jests were to be "without reflection." No man (and this smacks of Ben's arrogance) was to recite "insipid" poems, and no person was to be pressed to write verse. There were to be in this little Elysium of an evening no vain disputes, and no lovers were to mope about unsocially in corners. No fighting or brawling was to be tolerated, and no glasses or windows broken, nor was tapestry to be torn down in wantonness. The rooms were to be kept warm; and, above all, any one who betrayed what the club chose to do or say was to be, nolens volens, banished. Over the clock in the kitchen some wit had inscribed in neat Latin the merry motto, "If the wine of last night hurts you, drink more to-day, and it will cure you -a happy version of the dangerous axiom of "Take a hair of the dog that bit you."

since the time of James I. Shakespeare himself must, day after day, have looked up at the old sign of St. Dunstan tweaking the Devil by the nose, that flaunted in the wind near the Bar. Perhaps the sign was originally a compliment to the gold-brated with laughing, leaping, dancing, jests, and smith's men who frequented it, for St. Dunstan was, like St. Eloy, a patron saint of goldsmiths, and himself worked at the forge as an amateur artificer of church plate. It may, however, have only been a mark of respect to the saint, whose church stood hard by, to the east of Chancery Lane. At the "Devil" the Apollo Club, almost the first institution of the kind in London, held its merry meetings, presided over by that grim yet jovial despot, Ben Jonson. The bust of Apollo, skilfully modelled from the head of the Apollo Belvidere, that once kept watch over the door, and heard in its time millions of witty things and scores of fond recollections of Shakespeare by those who personally knew and loved him, is still preserved at Child's bank. They also show there among their heirlooms "The Welcome," probably written by immortal Ben himself, which is full of a jovial inspiration that speaks well for the canary at the "Devil." It used to stand over the chimney-piece, written in gilt letters on a black board, and some of the wittiest and wisest men of the reigns of James and Charles must have read it over their cups. The verses run,—

"Welcome all who lead or follow

To the oracle of Apollo," &c.

--

Beneath these verses some enthusiastic disciple of the author has added the brief epitaph inscribed by an admirer on the crabbed old poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey,

"O, rare Ben Jonson."

The rules of the club (said to have been originally cut on a slab of black marble) were placed above the fireplace. They were devised by Ben Jonson, in imitation of the rules of the Roman entertainments, collected by the learned Lipsius; and, as Leigh Hunt says, they display the author's usual style of elaborate and compiled learning, not without a taste of that dictatorial self-sufficiency that made him so many enemies. They were translated by Alexander Brome, a poetical attorney of the day, who was one of Ben Jonson's twelve adopted poeti

cal sons. We have room only for the first few, to
show the poetical character of the club :—

"Let none but guests or clubbers hither come;
Let dunces, fools, and sordid men keep home;
Let learned, civil, merry men b' invited,
And modest, too; nor be choice liquor slighted.
Let nothing in the treat offend the guest:
More for delight than cost prepare the feast."

At these club feasts the old poet with "the mountain belly and the rocky face," as he has painted himself, presided, ready to enter the ring against all comers. By degrees the stern man with the worn features, darkened by prison cell and hardened by battle-fields, had mellowed into a Falstaff. Long struggles with poverty had made Ben arrogant, for he had worked as a bricklayer in early life and had served in Flanders as a common soldier; he had killed a rival actor in a duel, and had been in danger of having his nose slit in the pillory for a libel against King James's Scotch courtiers. Intellectually, too,. Ben had reason to claim a sort of sovereignty over the minor poets. His Every Man in his Humour had been a great success; Shakespeare had helped him forward, and been his bosom friend. Parts of his Sejanus, such as the speech of Envy, beginning,-

"Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves, Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness," are as sublime as his songs, such as

"Drink to me only with thine eyes,"

are graceful, serious, and lyrical. The great compass of his power and the command he had of the lyre no one could deny; his learning Donne and Camden could vouch for. He had written the most beautiful of court masques; his Bobadil some men preferred to Falstaff. Alas! no Pepys or Boswell has noted the talk of those evenings.

A few glimpses of the meetings we have, and but a few. One night at the "Devil" a country