The Devil Tavern, which Ben Jonson made so famous by his Apollo Club, and which stood between Temple Bar and the Middle Temple Gate, was bought by Messrs Child, the bankers, in 1787, some years after the death of Samuel Johnson, when it had fallen into disuse, and was pulled down and dwelling-houses erected on its site. Ben's "Welcome" and the Apollo bust were transferred to the bank. The most famous of all the Johnsonian taverns, the Mitre, was another of the old houses to fall a victim to bankers, for four years after the Doctor's death it ceased to be a tavern, became in turn Macklin's Poets' Gallery and Saunders's auction-rooms, and was finally pulled down that on its site "Hoare's New Banking-house" should be erected. Joe's Coffee-house in Mitre Court borrowed the derelict name when the Mitre closed its shutters, and set up a copy of Nollekins' bust of the Doctor as homage to his memory. Opposite to Wine Office Court, the Sage of Fleet Street would stop in his shamble and would wait for an opportunity to cross the road. If Doctor Johnson hated the transit of the roadway when the traffic was but of hackney carriages and the coaches of aldermen and stage coaches and horsemen, how would he face the hurtling streams of taxi-cabs and motor omnibuses which nowadays jostle in the road? And what, when he had crossed the road, would he think of Fuller's little sweet-stuff shop which, gay with colour, has fastened itself, where there used to be a dingy wine merchant's office with cobwebbed bottles of old port in its dim, solemn windows, on the Fleet Street front of the Old Cheshire Cheese? The new-comer looks like a bright stamp stuck on some musty old parchment deed. Doctor Johnson would, I am sure, growl as he rolled through the narrow entrance into the court and on to the door of the old tavern.