"We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding was mentioned as a candidate. Only one, however, seconded the proposition. 'Richardson?' 'By all means; but only to look at him through the glass-door of his back-shop, hard at work upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary contrast that ever was presented between an author and his works), but not to let him come behind his counter, lest he should want you to turn customer; nor to go upstairs with him, lest he should offer to read the first manuscript of "Sir Charles Grandison," which was originally written in twenty-eight volumes octavo; or get out the letters of his female correspondents to prove that "Joseph Andrews" was low.' "There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any one expressed the least desire to see--Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face and wily policy--and one enthusiast, John Bunyan, the immortal author of 'The Pilgrim's Progress.'.... "Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received with the greatest enthusiasm. He presently superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on condition that he should sit in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the farce,--Lear and Wildair, and Abel Drugger.... "Lamb inquired if there was any one that was hanged that I would choose to mention, and I answered, 'Eugene Aram.'" The present Hare Place was the once disreputable Ram Alley, the scene of a comedy of that name, written by Lodowick Barry and dramatised in the reign of James I.; the plot Killigrew afterwards used in his vulgar _Parson's Wedding_. Barry, an Irishman, of whom nothing much is known, makes one of his roystering characters say,-- "And rough Ram Alley stinks with cooks' shops vile; Yet, stay, there's many a worthy lawyer's chamber 'Buts upon Ram Alley."