Doctor Samuel Johnson stands in bronze before St Clement Danes and faces his beloved Fleet Street. If the great dictionary maker took his eyes off the book he holds in his hands, got down from his pedestal without knocking over the inkpot which is perilously near his clumsy old feet, and started for a walk down the street he loved so well, his remarks on the changes that have been made by time and the architects would be instructive. What would he say to Street's Law Courts? And with what sesquipedalian words would he lament the disappearance of Temple Bar and the appearance in its stead of the pantomime Griffin? And how the old man would snort and fume to find the taverns he was used to frequent altered out of recognition, or moved from their old places. The Rainbow's lamp would bring him to a halt, for the Rainbow stands to-day where Farr the barber set up his coffee-house, "by inner Temple Gate." Farr was "presented," in 1657, as an abuse by his neighbours, who protested against the smell of the coffee, but were in reality afraid that the new drink was going to oust canary and other wines. Johnson knew the old tavern in the brave days when Alexander Moncrieff was the host, when it still, though its "stewed cheeses" and its stout were celebrated, called itself a coffee-house, and the largest room was the coffee-room, with a lofty bay-window at the south end looking into the Temple. In this bay the table was set for the worthies who frequented the house, and they could, through a glazed screen, see all that went on in the kitchen. The old Doctor, reading on the door-jamb that the Rainbow is occupied by the Bodega Company, would discourse learnedly on the meaning and uses of a Bodega. He would note with approval Groom's little coffee-house, a few steps farther on, which, though it did not exist in his days, for it dates back only to 1818, is one of the few establishments still existing which lives by the sale of coffee as a beverage, and prospers on its best Mocha at threepence a cup. The Cock in its present condition would puzzle the old man most consumedly, and he would look across the street to see what has become of that tavern's old site; but if he went inside the house he would find that Grinling Gibbons' wood-carving of the cock had flown across the street, and that in the upper room is the panelling from the old alehouse in which the festive Pepys drank and sang and ate a lobster and afterwards "mightily merry" took Knip for a moonlight row on the Thames. It would be useless to talk to the Doctor of Tennyson and the plump head-waiter of the Cock, but pilgrims following the footsteps of those poets who have lunched in Fleet Street will find that the Cock is still a house where the "perfect pint of stout" and the "proper chop" are reached out with deft hands to customers, and that no head waiter unless he be plump is ever engaged for the upper room.