AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE ” 23 “THE WAY IN” ” 27 THE BAR ” 37 “THE WAY OUT” ” 38 DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE ” 55 _IN TEXT_ PAGE ENTRANCE TO THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE IN WINE OFFICE COURT 5 STAIRCASE IN “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE” 8 CHESHIRE COURT AT SIDE OF OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE 25 FRONTISPIECE OF BILL OF FARE 78 PRINTED BY EDEN FISHER & CO., LTD., 95-97, FENCHURCH ST., LONDON, E.C. [Illustration: “TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE.” _By W. Dendy Sadler._ _By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, owner of the Copyright._] [Illustration: A _Storied_ TAVERN.] CHAPTER I EARLY HISTORY OF YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE Time consecrates; And what is grey with age becomes religion.—SCHILLER. Old London is fast disappearing off the face of the earth. One by one its ancient taverns have gone, or if the names familiar to our ancestors have been retained, the hand of the builder has been laid remorselessly on the structures our forefathers knew, and they have been transformed beyond recognition. One of them, however, survives, untouched by the hand of time, spared by the vitality of the traditions, literary and other, which it enshrines, and that is the Cheshire Cheese. Though its story reaches back long before the eighteenth century, it is with the memory of Dr. Johnson and his more brilliant contemporaries that it is very largely associated in the minds of men. It is in a special sense London’s living memorial of the great Lexicographer. Amid the changes which have altered Fleet Street almost beyond recognition by the Doctor and his contemporaries, it stands safe still, its old activities in full swing in the narrow backwater of Wine Office Court, a venerable reminder of the past. That men should be possessed with an unwearying curiosity about the old tavern which was so much the haunt of the mighty literary potentate who was the patron and friend of Goldsmith, is but natural. They feel for it what the devotee feels for a shrine. Dr. Johnson was not himself indifferent to a sentiment of the sort, and just as we take an intense interest in the “Cheshire Cheese” which he frequented, so he, in his day, was sympathetically curious as to the places which Dryden half a century or so before the Doctor’s time had made sacred to literary memory by his presence.