* * * * * This sketch of the “head waiter at the ‘Cock,’” is the portion of the poem that is the best known and oftenest quoted. But the rest is full of noble, sad pictures. The region about is a sort of tavern-land; there used to be a strange ramshackle place opposite, “Tom’s,” or “Sam’s,” or “Joe’s,” (we forget which), with the old “Rainbow”; and hard by was “Carr’s”--the older “Carr’s,”--which owed its repute to a sentence in “Household Words,” which praised the “capital cut off the joint, washed down by a pint of good Burgundy.” You passed through a little squeezed and panelled passage to enter “The Cock,” and at the end of the passage was seen the little window of the “snuggery,” or bar, most inviting on a winter’s night, with something simmering on the hob. There sat one whom we might call “Miss Abbey”--like Dickens’s directress of the “Fellowship Porters”--to whom came the waiters, to receive the good hunches, “new or stale?” which she, according to old unvarying rule, chalked down, or up, on the mahogany sill of the door. All was duly sawdusted. The ceiling of the long, low tavern room seemed on our heads. The windows small, like skylights, opened upon the hilly passage or lane outside. There were “boxes” or pews all round, with green curtains, of mahogany black as ebony. But the coveted places--say about a sharp Christmas-time--were the two that faced the good fire, on which sang a huge kettle. The curious old chimney-piece over it was of carved oak, with strange grinning faces, one of which used to delight Dickens, who invited people’s attention to it particularly. There was a quaintness, too, in the china trays for the pewter mugs, each decorated with an effigy of a cock. On application, those in office produced to you a well-thumbed copy of Defoe’s “History of the Plague,” where allusion is made to the establishment, and also a little circular box, in which was carefully preserved one of the copper tokens of the house--a little lean, battered piece, with the device of a cock, and the inscriptions “The Cock Alehouse,” and “C. H. M. ATT. TEMPLE BARR, 1655.” The _Intelligencer_, No. 45, contains the following advertisement: “This is to notify that the Master of the Cock and Bottle, commonly called the Cock Alehouse, at Temple Bar, hath dismissed his servants and shut up his house for this long vacation, intending (God willing) to return at Michaelmas next, so that all persons whatsoever, who have any Accompts with the said master, _or Farthings belonging to the said house_, are desired to repair thither before the 8th of this instant July, and they shall receive satisfaction.”