“Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy fields or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?” Truly a capricious wind has carried away the old Mermaid sign into far and unknown regions, and to-day the scholars are disputing where really the famous house stood. Two other taverns, less roughly handled by Father Time, may claim to be next in literary rank: “The Cheshire Cheese” and “The Cock,” both in Fleet Street. “Ye olde Cheshire Cheese,” or simply “The Cheese,” is not easy to find because it really stands on a narrow side-lane, the Wine Office Court. It has the great advantage of having preserved unchanged the character of a seventeenth-century tavern. Although venerable, it is not the original building, which was destroyed, together with many other public-houses in the great fire of 1666. Pious souls saw in the fact that the conflagration started in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner an evident proof that the fire was sent from Heaven as punishment for “the sin of gluttony.” Shakespeare is said to have turned in not unfrequently at the old house of the “Cheshire Cheese” on his way to the Blackfriars’ Theatre in the Playhouse Yard, Ludgate Hill, where he was director for a time, or coming back for a twilight drink after the performance, which in those times closed as early as five o’clock. In spite of the warning fire of 1666 the sin of gluttony is still readily committed in the “Cheshire Cheese,” whose specialty, a meat pudding,--containing not only roast beef, kidneys, and oysters, but sky-larks too!--might even be called a sin against the holy ghost of poetry. Once immersed in this pudding the divine singers are silent forever without the consolation of the children’s book:-- “And when the pie was opened The birds began to sing.” Some of these lark puddings are even shipped to Yankeeland, which sends every year countless pilgrims to the “Cheshire Cheese.” If possible, the American father of a family will take the seat of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous lexicographer, lean his head against the old paneling, which clearly shows the marks of the greasy wigs of the Doctor and his friend Oliver Goldsmith, and look at chick and child with an Olympian air, as if he wanted to say: “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.”