Mr. Jay’s fifty-five years, from 1868, take us back to 1813, or little more than a quarter of a century after the death of Johnson. But who then was Mr. Jay, and what are his claims to credibility? “I have heard,” says Dr. Birkbeck Hill, that indefatigable inquirer into Johnsonian facts and dates, “a member of our (the Johnson) club relate that, when he was a student of law, there used to be pointed out to him in the Cheshire Cheese an old gentleman who, day after day, was always to be found there, prolonging his dinner by an unbroken succession of glasses of gin and water. It was as a kind of awful warning of the depths to which a lawyer might sink, that this toper was shown, and it was added in a whisper that he was the son of Jay, of Bath. Jay, of Bath, is well-nigh forgotten now, but during the first half of the present century his fame as a preacher stood exceedingly high. It was Cyrus Jay, his son, who for fifty-three years frequenting this ancient tavern, preserved and handed down this curious tradition of Johnson. The landlord has told me how, in his childhood, he used to hear in the distance the gruff voice of the old gentleman as he came along Fleet Street, and how sometimes he was sent to see Mr. Jay safe home to his chambers at 15 Serjeants’ Inn hard by. For most of his long life, port, that medium liquor, neither like claret for boys nor brandy for heroes, but the drink for men, had been his favourite beverage. A failing income brought him down at last to gin and water. He used to comfort himself by the reflection that he could get twice as drunk for half the money. He dined in the tavern to the very end. One evening he was led home to his lodgings, and within four-and-twenty hours he was dead. He was the last frequenter of the Old Cheshire Cheese who knew the men who had known Johnson. Mine host remembers a still older guest, Dr. Pooley by name, a barrister, who died about 1856, at the age of eighty. Night after night for many a long year he had dined at half-past seven to the minute on a ‘follower,’ the end chop of the loin. He, too, used to tell of the men of his younger days, who boasted that they had often spent an evening there with Dr. Samuel Johnson.” [Illustration: “THE COSY CORNER” IN OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.] Another writer, Mr. Cyrus Redding, who went to live in Gough Square in 1806, in his “Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal,” published in 1858, takes us a little further back. He says: “I often dined at the Cheshire Cheese. Johnson and his friends, I was informed, used to do the same, and I was told I should see individuals who had met them there. This I found to be correct. The company was more select than in later times. Johnson had been dead about twenty years, but there were Fleet Street tradesmen who well remembered both Johnson and Goldsmith in this place of entertainment.”