No. 161 (north) was the shop of Thomas Hardy, that agitating bootmaker, secretary to the London Corresponding Society, who was implicated in the John Horne Tooke trials of 1794; and next door, years after (No. 162), Richard Carlisle, a "freethinker," opened a lecturing, conversation, and discussion establishment, preached the "only true gospel," hung effigies of bishops outside his shop, and was eventually quieted by nine years' imprisonment, a punishment by no means undeserved. No. 76 (south) was once the entrance to the printing-office of Samuel Richardson, the author of "Clarissa," who afterwards lived in Salisbury Square, and there held levees of his admirers, to whom he read his works with an innocent vanity which occasionally met with disagreeable rebuffs. "Anderton's Hotel" (No. 164, north side) occupies the site of a house given, as Mr. Noble says, in 1405, to the Goldsmiths' Company, under the singular title of "The Horn in the Hoop," probably at that time a tavern. In the register of St. Dunstan's is an entry (1597), "Ralph slaine at the Horne, buryed," but no further record exists of this hot-headed roysterer. In the reign of King James I. the "Horn" is described as "between the 'Red Lion,' over against Serjeants' Inn, and Three-legged Alley." [Illustration: AN EVENING WITH DR. JOHNSON AT THE "MITRE" (_see page 51_).] [Illustration: OLD HOUSES (STILL STANDING) IN FLEET STREET, NEAR ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH (_see page 52_).] The _Record_ (No. 169, north side) started in 1828 as an organ of the extreme Evangelical party. The first promoters were the late Mr. James Evans, a brother of Sir Andrew Agnew, and Mr. Andrew Hamilton, of West Ham Common (the first secretary of the Alliance Insurance Company). Among their supporters were Henry Law, Dean of Gloucester, and Francis Close, afterwards Dean of Carlisle. Amongst its earliest writers was the celebrated Dr. John Henry Newman, of Oxford. The paper was all but dying when a new "whip" was made for money, and the Rev. Henry Blunt, of Chelsea, became for a short time its editor. The _Record_ at last began to flourish and to assume a bolder and a more independent tone. Dean Milman's neology, the peculiarities of the Irvingites, and the dangerous Oxford tracts, were alternately denounced. In due course the _Record_ began to appear three times a week, and became celebrated for its uncompromising religious tone and, as Mr. James Grant truly says, for the earliness and accuracy of its politico-ecclesiastical information.