In 1813 sundry improvements projected by Alderman Pickett led to the removal of one of the greatest eye-sores in London--Butcher Row. This street of ragged lazar-houses extended in a line from Wych Street to Temple Bar. They were overhanging, drunken-looking, tottering tenements,[259] receptacles of filth, and invitations to the cholera. In Dr. Johnson’s time they were mostly eating-houses. This stack of buildings on the west side of Temple Bar was in the form of an acute-angled triangle; the eastern point, nearest the Bar, was formed latterly by a shoemaker’s and a fishmonger’s shop, with wide fronts; its western point being blunted by the intersection of St. Clement’s vestry-room and almshouse. On both sides of it resided bakers, dyers, smiths, combmakers, and tinplate-workers. The decayed street had been a flesh-market since Queen Elizabeth’s time, when it flourished. A scalemaker’s, a fine-drawer’s, and Betty’s chophouse, were all to be found there.[260] The whole stack was built of wood, and was probably of about the age of Edward VI. The ceilings were low, traversed by huge unwrought beams, and dimly lit by small casement windows. The upper stories overhung the lower, according to the old London plan of widening the footway. It was at Clifton’s Eating-house, in Butcher Row, in 1763, that that admirable gossip and useful parasite, Boswell, with a tremor of foolish horror, heard Dr. Johnson disputing with a petulant Irishman about the cause of negroes being black. “Why, sir,” said Johnson, with judicial grandeur, “it has been accounted for in three ways--either by supposing that they were the posterity of Ham, who was cursed; or that God first created two kinds of men, one black and the other white; or that by the heat of the sun the skin is scorched, and so acquires a sooty hue. This matter has been much canvassed among naturalists, but has never been brought to any certain issue.”[261] What the Irishman’s arguments were, Boswell of course forgot, but as his antagonist became warm and intemperate, Johnson rose and quietly walked away. When he had retired, the Irishman said--“He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity unworthy of a man of genius.” (This very same evening Boswell and his deity first supped together at the Mitre.) It was here, many years later, that Johnson spent pleasant evenings with his old college friend Edwards,[262] whom he had not seen since the golden days of youth. Edwards, a good, dull, simple-hearted fellow, talked of their age. “Don’t let us discourage one another,” said Johnson, with quiet reproof. It was this same worthy fellow who amused Burke at the club by saying--“You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried in my time to be a philosopher too, but I don’t know how it was, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” This was a wise blunder, worthy of Goldsmith, the prince of wise blunderers.