“It matters little what hour you select to visit ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,’ you will have plenty to amuse and instruct you, and always find the pretty barmaids in the bar room attentive and clever. The cutting of the rump-steak and kidney pie is a spearing process performed by the proprietor, and often as many as three, even four waiters are needed to lift the huge smoking hot pie to the centre table, while often from thirty to sixty hungry men wait at the various tables for a triangle of this toothsome viand. Take my word for it, you will have a great desire for a second help, and even though, like myself, you are a petticoat wearer, no one will annoy you or even look surprised at your devoting an evening among the odd masculine characters nightly frequenting ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.’” In an article written by Mr. W. Outram Tristram, and illustrated by Mr. Herbert Railton, the _English Illustrated Magazine_ of December, 1889, gives, under the title of “A Storied Tavern,” a most interesting account of this old house. “Here,” says the writer, “is no home for kickshaws and cigarettes. From this kitchen comes no sample of fashionable culinary art, that ‘art with poisonous honey stolen from France.’ Nothing of that kind obtains at the Cheshire Cheese. Here the narrowed kingdom lies of point steaks turned to a second and served hissing on plates supernaturally hot, of chops gargantuan in size and inimitable in tenderness and flavour, of cheese bubbling sympathetically in tiny tins, of floury potatoes properly cooked, of tankards of bitter beer, of extra creaming stout, of a rump-steak and oyster pudding served on Saturdays only,[8] and so much the specialty of the house, that I must deal with it hereafter. All smacks here of that England of solid comfort and solid plenty. “There is a collection of useful IMPLEMENTS OF INEBRIETY in the bar of the Cheshire Cheese, which brings the place’s past more vividly, perhaps, before one than any view of its sanded floors, low ceilings, or quaint staircase, disappearing suddenly from the entrance passage in formal but inviting bend. “Voltaire was certainly here; Bolingbroke, in this place cracked many a bottle of Burgundy; and Congreve’s wit flashed wine-inspired, while Pope, sickly and intolerant of tobacco-smoke, suffered under these low roofs I doubt not many a headache. But it is of its distinguished visitors of later days that the Cheshire Cheese as it now stands reminds one most fully. Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Chatterton were undoubted frequenters. Many a time the great Samuel, turning heavily in his accustomed seat, and beset by some pert sailing pinnace, brought, like a galleon manœuvring, his ponderous artillery to bear. Goldsmith lived at No. 6 Wine Office Court, where he wrote or partly wrote the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ his flagging inspiration possibly gaining assistance from the tavern’s famed Madeira.