Doctor Johnson was, indeed, a faithful Londoner. He lived in no less than sixteen London houses (among them, several "Inns"), all situated in and around Holborn and the Strand. Nearly all of these abodes have now disappeared, or are unidentified; only the Gough Square house still exists. It is picturesque, chiefly on account of its age; it stands back out of Fleet Street, in a little court, and has been often sketched. It is a corner house, numbered seventeen (marked by a tablet), and remains, in externals at least, much as Johnson left it 140 years ago, though internally it is a network of dusty offices. Johnson's Court (not named from him), where he also lived, is now swallowed up in "Anderton's Hotel." In Gough Square the greater part of the celebrated Dictionary was written; here Johnson's wife died, and here he "had an upper room fitted up like a counting-house in which he gave to the copyists their several tasks." It was, however, in Bolt Court, his last house, that the curious army of pensioners lived whom this strange old scholar-philanthropist collected round him: [Illustration: _Wych Street._] "His strange household of fretful and disappointed alms-people seems as well known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these fretful and quarrelsome old dames Dr. Johnson has himself sketched, in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale: 'Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them."