These old waifs and strays were not, apparently, even always grateful. But, in any case, the annoyance of "such a menagerie of singular oddities" must have driven him more and more to his clubs, and especially to his favourite haunt the "Cheshire Cheese." This ancient tavern, still existing in its pristine simplicity in Wine Office Court, "and," says Hare, "the most perfect old tavern in London," is the classic retreat where Johnson and Goldsmith held their court; Johnson in the window-seat, and Goldsmith on his right hand. To American tourists, I gather, it is a specially sacred place of pilgrimage. In that low, dark, sanded parlour of the "Cheshire Cheese," you might easily imagine yourself in some rural retreat, miles away from London, though so close in fact to the din and civilisation of Fleet Street. Not only far from London, but far away back in the eighteenth century. Can such things be, you wonder, in the London of our day? You sit in Johnson's time-honoured seat, under his brass-plate inscription, and his picture; darkened oak panelling lines the walls; artistic Bohemians blow smoke-wreaths over their toasted cheese and whiskies, hilariously in yonder corner; and even the waiters are not of the uncommunicative, cut-and-dried modern sort, but rather the cheery, jovial order of Dickens's time. One of them brings you the "visitors' book"; two ponderous tomes filled with brilliant sketches by well-known artists, some of the sketches amiably suggestive of the sketchers having supped "not wisely, but too well"; another tells you, with all the pride of long association, that "the place has not changed one whit since Johnson's time"; and yet a third, with an expansiveness rare indeed in London, will point out to you "Goldsmith's favourite window-seat." Oliver Goldsmith, the erratic genius who "wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll," was one of Johnson's satellites, another shining light of old Fleet Street. He had the artistic temperament indeed, for when he was not in the clutches of the bailiffs, he was usually revelling in absurd extravagance. Goldsmith's last lodging, in No. 2, Brick Court, Temple, he furnished with ridiculous lavishness, dressing himself to match, in "Tyrian-bloom satin with gold buttons." Dr. Johnson must sometimes have been tried by his friend, as the following story shows: (Newbery, Goldsmith's publisher, had apparently refused further advances to his impecunious client):