Such are the "byways of fiction" in London! Next to Dickens, in whose persuasive company we have wandered from Fact to Fiction, Dr. Johnson is, perhaps, of all our great Londoners, the most prominent. To him, indeed, the everlasting noise and bustle of the capital, "the roaring of the loom of time," was ever dear. Sayings of his about London have, in many cases, almost passed into household words: "He who is tired of London is tired of existence"; "Sir, let us take a walk into Fleet Street"; "I think the full tide of existence is at Charing Cross." Dr. Johnson had a great admiration for Fleet Street, which he thought finer than anything he knew. The old doctor's well-known figure, so often painted, in the ancient full-bottomed wig, and rusty clothes, yet, for us, haunts the shades of the Strand, yet lingers near his old haunts, fumbling in the displayed stores of the second-hand book shops. "The old philosopher is still among us, in the brown coat and the metal buttons." Johnson's London houses,--Gough Square, Bolt Court, Johnson's Court, and many others; Johnson's favourite Fleet Street taverns, notably the famous "Cheshire Cheese," with its well-known literary coterie; these are almost too familiar to need description; they, and the Johnsonian element they recall, are bound up intimately with London's eighteenth-century history. There is scarcely any street so little altered, since then, in its characteristics, as Fleet Street. And if the Fleet Street of our own day, with its still irregular houses, its occasional glimpses, down some alley, of the shining river which it skirts, is picturesque,--what must it have been in Johnson's day, when its shops yet displayed their gay projecting signs? when "timbered fronts" and gables were the rule; when the charming dress of the day, with its gay satins and ruffles, knee breeches and buckles, was the mode? Though, for that matter, the old doctor himself, the essential spirit of the Fleet Street of the time, can hardly have been a fashionable figure: "It must be confessed," says Boswell, "that his ... morning dress was sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled, unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt neck and the knees of his breeches were loose, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers."