“Far from me, and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us, indifferent and unmoved, over any ground, which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.” --SAMUEL JOHNSON. I. [Illustration: “Old Bricks for Sale.”] Such is the legend that catches one’s eye, plain for all men to see, on many a hoarding in London streets. Behind those boards, wide or high, on which the callous contractor shamelessly blazons his dreadful trade--“Old Houses Bought to be Pulled Down”--he is stupidly pickaxing to pieces historic bricks and mortar which ought to be preserved priceless and imperishable. Within only a few years, I have had to look on, while thus were broken to bits and carted away to chaos John Dryden’s dwelling-place in Fetter Lane, Benjamin Franklin’s and Washington Irving’s lodgings in Little Britain, Byron’s birthplace in Hollis Street, Milton’s “pretty garden-house,” in Petty France, Westminster. The spacious fireplace by which the poet sat, during his fast-darkening days--for in this house he lost his first wife and his eyesight--was knocked down, as only one among other numbered lots, to stolid builders. And the stone, “Sacred to Milton, the Prince of Poets”--placed in the wall facing the garden, by William Hazlitt, living here early in our century, beneath which Jeremy Bentham, occupant of the adjoining house, was wont to make his guests fall on their knees--this stone has gone to “patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.” To this house there used to come, to call on Hazlitt, a man of noticeable and impressive presence:--small of stature, fragile of frame, clad in clothing of tightly fitting black, which was clerical as to cut and well-worn as to texture; his “almost immaterial legs,” in Tom Hood’s phrase, ending in gaiters and straps; his dark hair, not quite black, curling crisply about a noble head and brow--“a head worthy of Aristotle,” Leigh Hunt tells us; “full of dumb eloquence,” are Hazlitt’s words; “such only may be seen in the finer portraits of Titian,” John Forster puts it; “a long, melancholy face, with keen penetrating eyes,” we learn from Barry Cornwall; brown eyes, kindly, quick, observant; his dark complexion and grave expression brightened by the frequent “sweet smile, with a touch of sadness in it.”