|NOT very far from 'streaming London's central roar'--or, in plain words, about midway in Fleet Street, on the left-hand side as you go toward Ludgate Hill--is a high and narrow archway or passage over which is painted in dingy letters the words 'Bolt Court.' To the lover of the 'Great Cham of Literature,' the name comes freighted with memories. More than a hundred years ago 'the ponderous mass of Johnson's form,' to quote a poem by Mrs. Barbauld, must often have darkened that contracted approach, when, in order to greet with tea the coming day ('veniente die'), * and to postpone if possible that 'unseasonable hour at which he had habituated himself to expect the oblivion of repose,' he rolled across from the Temple to Miss Williams's rooms. Where the blind lady lodged, no Society of Arts tablet now reveals to us; but as soon as the pilgrim has traversed the dark and greasy entrance-way, and finds himself in the little court itself, with its disorderly huddle of buildings, and confusion of tip-cat playing children, he is in Johnson's land, and only a few steps from the actual spot on which Johnson's last hours were spent. Fronting him, in the farther angle of the enclosure, is the Stationers' Company's School, and the Stationers' Company's School stands upon the site of No. 8 Bolt Court, formerly Bensley's Printing Office, ** but earlier still the last residence of Dr. Johnson, who lived in it from 1776 to 1784. * 'Te venienie die, te decedenle canebat.'--Georg, iv. 466. * Bensley succeeded Allen the printer, Johnson's landlord. During Bensley's tenancy of the house it was twice the scene of disastrous fires, by the second of which (in June, 1819) the Doctor's old rooms were entirely destroyed. Among other valuables burned at Bensley's was the large wood block engraved by Bewick's pupil, Luke Clennell, for the diploma of the Highland Society; and the same artist's cuts after Stothard for Rogers's 'Pleasures of Memory' of 1810 were only saved from a like fate by being kept in a 'ponderous iron chest.' It was in the backroom of its first floor that, on Monday, the 13th December in the latter year, at about seven o'clock in the evening, his black servant Francis Barber and his friend Mrs. Desmoulins, who watched in the sick-chamber, 'observing that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found that he was dead.'