"'My Dear Friend, I thank you! I wish I could do something to serve you. I shall have a comedy for you in a season or two at furthest, that I believe will be worth your acceptance, for I fancy I will make it a fine thing. You shall have the refusal. I wish you would not take up Newbery's note, but let Waller' [probably a mistake for Wallis, Garrick's solicitor] 'tease him, without, however, coming to extremities; let him haggle after him and he will get it. He owes it and will pay it. I'm sorry you are ill. I will draw upon you one month after date for sixty pound, and your acceptance will be ready money, part of which I want to go down to Barton with. May God preserve my honest little man, for he has my heart.--Ever, "'Oliver Goldsmith.'" A final reminiscence of Garrick and this neighbourhood shows the actor soliciting the Adam brothers on behalf of Andrew Becket, who, when the Adelphi was being erected, had a bookseller's shop in the Strand. He was the son of Thomas Becket, the Pall Mall bookseller, whose establishment was frequented by Garrick. He must have been a precocious youth, for, at the age of fourteen, he had written a comedy founded on Rousseau's _Emile_, and a poem entitled _Theodosius and Constantia_. Born in 1749, he died in 1843. He was a frequent contributor to the chief magazines of his day. He had a great grievance against Ralph Griffiths, the proprietor of the _Monthly Review_, for having given him only forty-five pounds for nearly five years' work--280 articles, the result of reading and condensing 590 volumes. In _Shakespeare Himself Again_, Andrew Becket "released the original text from much muddy nonsense of commentators."[40] [Illustration: ST MARY ROUNCEVAL (THE ORIGINAL SITE OF NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE).] Garrick besought the corner house of Adam Street for his friend, a request that was granted. He asked for this "corner blessing," and addressed the architects as his "dear Adelphi." The house was No. 73 Strand, at the north-east corner of Adam Street. It was destroyed by fire on June 28, 1822, but rebuilt according to the original plan. Garrick, in the course of his letter to the Adams, said: "Pray, my dear and very good friends, think a little of this matter, and if you can make us happy, by suiting all our conveniences, we shall make his shop, as old Jacob Tonson's was formerly, the rendezvous of the first people in England. I have a little selfishness in this request--I never go to a coffee-house, seldom to taverns, and should constantly (if this action takes place) be at Becket's at one at noon and six at night." Garrick, no doubt, meant what he said, but there is no trace of his having visited Andrew Becket in this "corner blessing." The shop is now occupied by a firm of silversmiths.