“The historical haunts of Fleet Street have a peculiar charm for those who are open to the influences of association. The bench may be hard, but Dr. Johnson has sat upon it; the oak panelling is not luxurious to lean back against, but the periwigs of Steele and Addison have pressed it; the little room may be dingy, but the peach-coloured garments of Goldsmith once lent it a temporary brilliancy. “The Cock, immortalised by Tennyson, will live for ever in poetry, but the architects, alas! have decided that it shall vanish from the world of prose. But there is a favourite haunt of mine higher up in Fleet Street. There you can feast upon marrow bones. On Saturdays the _pièce de résistance_ is a wonderful pudding compounded of steaks, oysters, kidneys, and other unknown delicacies; there is a smoking-room upstairs, where punch is served in an old-fashioned bowl, with glasses of the pattern in use in the last century. THE CHEESE IN THE TIME OF JOHNSON “‘As soon as I enter the door of a tavern’—and many were the taverns whose doors the great Samuel entered—exclaimed Dr. Johnson from that tavern chair which he regarded as the throne of human felicity, ‘I experience an oblivion of care and a freedom from solitude; when I am seated I find the master courteous’ (courtesy is thus hereditary in the masters of the Cheshire Cheese) ‘and the servants obsequious to my call, anxious to know and ready to supply my wants; wine then exhilarates my spirits and prompts me to free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love: I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinion and sentiments I delight.’ “One can picture to oneself Johnson when he had entered and taken his favourite seat at the Cheshire Cheese, the fire blazing then as it blazes to-day, after a lapse of more than a century, in the mighty grate, and casting its flashes, as it casts them to-day, over the same oak-wainscotted walls, infusing a ruddier glow into the red curtains drawn across the windows, and dropping a deeper-dyed ruby into the drink that was meant for men. “All the other tavern haunts which Johnson and his disciples frequented have passed away or been improved out of all semblance to the Johnson era; but the Cheese remains, within and without, the same as it did when Goldsmith reeled up the steps to his lodgings opposite the main entrance in Wine Office Court, or Johnson rolled his huge bulk past it to the house in Gough Square, where his wife died in 1752 and the Dictionary was completed in 1755.” MR. PHILIP NORMAN, in the “Illustrated London News” for December, 1890, remarks, in his “Inns and Taverns of Old London”: