The Book of the Cheese

Old London is fast disappearing off the face of the earth. One by one its ancient taverns have gone, or if the names familiar to our ancestors have been retained, the hand of the builder has been laid remorselessly on the structures our forefathers knew, and they have been transformed beyond recognition. One of them, however, survives, untouched by the hand of time, spared by the vitality of the traditions, literary and other, which it enshrines, and that is the Cheshire Cheese. Though its story reaches back long before the eighteenth century, it is with the memory of Dr. Johnson and his more brilliant contemporaries that it is very largely associated in the minds of men. It is in a special sense London’s living memorial of the great Lexicographer. Amid the changes which have altered Fleet Street almost beyond recognition by the Doctor and his contemporaries, it stands safe still, its old activities in full swing in the narrow backwater of Wine Office Court, a venerable reminder of the past. That men should be possessed with an unwearying curiosity about the old tavern which was so much the haunt of the mighty literary potentate who was the patron and friend of Goldsmith, is but natural. They feel for it what the devotee feels for a shrine. Dr. Johnson was not himself indifferent to a sentiment of the sort, and just as we take an intense interest in the “Cheshire Cheese” which he frequented, so he, in his day, was sympathetically curious as to the places which Dryden half a century or so before the Doctor’s time had made sacred to literary memory by his presence.

“When I was a young fellow,” he says, “I wanted to write the life of Dryden, and in order to get materials I applied to the only two persons then alive who had seen him; these were old Swinney and old Cibber. Swinney’s information was no more than this, ‘That at Will’s Coffee-house, Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was set by the fire in winter and then called his winter chair, and that it was carried out for him to the balcony in summer, and then called his summer chair.’ I went and sat in it.”

Thanks, therefore, to the fact that we have one specimen of the Johnsonian tavern remaining practically the same as it was in the Johnsonian days, we can still depict for ourselves, with but the slightest effort of the imagination, what must have been the scene at the Cheshire Cheese in the Doctor’s time. Johnson is there in his favourite seat, mouthing and talking as who should say: “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.” One or other of his friends is never wanting to keep him company—Burke, or Goldsmith, or it may be Langton or Beauclerk. But the inn is with us, though the men of the eighteenth century are gone.

Even then the tavern as a club was beginning to fall into comparative decay. Fashion was voting for the club proper, proprietary or otherwise, and the habit of ceasing to live in the City carried away the old frequenters of the Fleet Street taverns into the suburbs or the more distant environs of London. Washington Irving gives us in his “Sketch Book” a charming account of one of the city of London hostelries, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The opening of the description would serve for the Cheshire Cheese of to-day. “This has been a temple of Mirth and Wine from time immemorial. It has always been in the family, so that its history is tolerably well preserved by the present landlord. It was much frequented by the gallants and cavalieros of the reign of Elizabeth, and was looked into now and then by the wits of Charles the Second. The members of the club which now holds its weekly sessions there abound in old catches, glees, and choice stories that are traditional in the place. The life of the club, and indeed the prime wit of the neighbourhood, is mine host himself. At the opening of every club night he is called in to sing his ‘Confession of Faith,’ which is the famous old drinking troll from Gammer Gurton’s ‘Needle.’” Washington Irving gives the words of the four verses of the song with chorus, the first of which, as a specimen of an old-time City tavern song, may suffice to be produced here:

But from the time of Dr. Johnson down to the present day unbroken links of tradition connect the Cheshire Cheese of the twentieth century with the Cheshire Cheese of the eighteenth, and through that with all the taverns in story, which begin with the Tabard and pass on, through the Mermaid and the rest, to the old house in Wine Office Court. This venerable survivor of a vanished race has a double interest: to the lover of antiquity in general it appeals as the type of the place our forefathers loved; to the lover of the Johnsonian cycle, as enabling him to picture to himself what that race of giants did, where they ate and drank, and where they talked. That they had reason for their choice of an inn, and could give a reason for that choice too, is plain from a well-known passage in Boswell, which runs as follows:—

“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it cannot be; there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests, the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man but a very impudent dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give” (we should remember that this was said in the rougher world of the last century), “the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”

Although the origin of the Old Cheshire Cheese (formerly spelt “Ye Olde Cheshire Chese”) is not altogether involved in obscurity, there is a decided want of complete, or even semi-complete, details as to its very early history; but it is much more affluent in literary anecdote.

It was in the Old Cheshire Cheese that the dispute arose about who would most quickly make the best couplet. One said:—

The other’s retort was:

“But that’s not rhyme,” said Sylvester. “No,” said Jonson; “but it’s true.”

A later poet, Lord Tennyson, was himself a frequenter of the “Cheese” in his young days, while it was there that Isaac Bickerstaff made the epigram:

In fact, the “Cheese” was famous for epigrammatists. Who would not like to have seen the face of the old glutton and scandalmonger when, in the “Cheese,” the following lines were solemnly presented to him?—

That Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and other distinguished men were in the habit of frequenting the Old Cheshire Cheese, there can be no manner of doubt, and they knew what they were about in choosing their place of rendezvous, for I find in a brochure entitled “Round London” (1725), that the house is described as “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Tavern, near ye Flete Prison, an eating-house for goodly fare.”

Wine Office Court, where the Cheshire Cheese is situated, took its name from the fact that wine licences were granted in a building close by. The present “wine office” of the Old Cheshire Cheese is exactly at the junction of the Court and Fleet Street.

“In this court,” says Mr. Noble, “once flourished a fig tree, planted a century ago by the vicar of St. Bride’s, who resided at No. 12. It was a slip from another exile of a tree formerly flourishing in a sooty kind of grandeur at the sign of the Fig Tree in Fleet Street.”

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“How do you make it?” asked a fair American of the proprietor.

The answer is not recorded, for in the manner of making chiefly lies the speciality of the Old Cheshire Cheese. The hand of the proprietor himself compounds the ingredients in a secret room, secure from the gaze of even his most inquisitive attendants.

Yet when we look on the immense bowl from which sixty or seventy people are to be fed, one cannot wonder at the lady’s desire to know how such a Brobdingnagian dish could be so exquisitely prepared.

The proportions of the bowl are emblematic of the profusion with which its contents are dispensed, and even Gargantua would find himself vanquished in presence of the “Cheese” hospitality.

Old “William,” for many years the head-waiter, could only be seen in his real glory on Pudding Days. He used to consider it his duty to go round the tables insisting that the guests should have second or third, ay, and with wonder be it spoken, fourth helpings.

“Any gentleman say pudden?” was his constant query; and his habit was not broken when a crusty customer growled:

“No gentleman says pudden.”

William either never saw the point or disdained to make reply.

The narrow limits of this volume are all too small for a complete collection of the prose and verse written in praise of the pudding. A few examples must serve.

In “Ye Lay of Ye Lost Minstrel,” printed in the West London Observer (April, 1890), are a number of verses in praise of the “Cheese,” by Mr. William Henderson. We give the following extract from his poem:—

A parody by the same author will appeal to the sentiment of those who scorn a foreign yoke. It is inscribed to Beaufoy A. Moore, and was published by Mr. J. H. Wadsworth, of Boston (U.S.A.):—

YE PUDDING’S REQUIEM

Air: Death of Nelson.

1890. W.H.

The “Cheese” pudding has a far-extended sphere of influence. It boasts a clientèle much more numerous than are the actual frequenters of the ancient hostelry. Hundreds are sent out every year to all parts of London, and, indeed, England. Some even have found their way to the United States, imported direct from “The Cheese” by enthusiastic Americans. The following extract from the Court Journal of April 4, 1891, describes the misadventures of one owing to the operation of the McKinley Act: “The London lark pudding is renowned in many lands. The travelled American speaks with rapture of that lark pudding he partook of in Fleet Street. Mr. Burras, of New York, requested that such a lark pudding should be sent out to him from London, so that the stay-at-home ones might partake of the British culinary luxury. The delicacy duly arrived; the guests who were to aid Mr. Burras in eating it were duly invited—all was ready, indeed, when an unexpected difficulty arose. The Customs House authorities declined to give it up until the question as to what duty ‘lark pudding’ was liable to was settled. The McKinley Bill does not mention lark pudding. It takes cognisance of canned goods and potted meats, certainly; but larks in a pudding were unclassified, and they said it did not come under the head of manufactured articles, because it was food in a natural state. A week has elapsed while the authorities have been debating the point, and in the meantime the lark pudding is most probably turning sour, and Mr. Burras and his friends dancing with indignation. More trouble will ensue over this lark pudding, no doubt, than did upon the opening of the four-and-twenty-blackbird pie of yore! It may cause the establishment of Free Trade in the States.”

It is satisfactory to be able to state that the pudding eventually passed the Customs House none the worse for its detention. The guests were eloquent in its praise, and several of them have since visited England merely to track the pudding to the place of its nativity.

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One of the most interesting features of the “Cheese” is its club life. It is not the stately and withal solemn life of the modern West-end club, but it is the social and intensely human life of the club as Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, understood it. When the Doctor, Sir Joshua, and some others established “The Club” in 1764, the members were to meet once a month and take supper, passing their evening in witty discourses.

At the “Old Cheshire Cheese” the Johnsonian tradition is naturally strong; it pervades the whole place, and all the clubs which hold their regular or occasional meetings there endeavour, as much as our less heroic days will allow, to emulate the example of the giants of the days gone by.

The following is a complete list of the clubs actually in existence at the present time:—The Johnson Club, founded about 25 years; Sawdust Club, founded 1906; Ye Punchbowlers; the Mitre Club, founded November, 1903; “Ourselves,” founded 1897; St. Dunstan’s, founded 1790; Rump Steak Club; the Dickens Club.

The following further details regarding the Cheshire Cheese Clubs of the past as well as the present may be found not without interest. The place of honour is given to—

THE JOHNSON CLUB.

This club is composed of many men eminent in literature and art, or distinguished in other ways. The club, which is literary and social, and is restricted to thirty-one members, was founded about twenty-five years ago. The members bind themselves to sup together annually on or about December 13, the anniversary of the Doctor’s death, but various other meetings are held throughout the year. The constitution of the club is thus described by Dr. George Birkbeck Hill, the well-known editor of the latest and best edition of “Boswell.” “We are,” he says (in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1896), “in strict accordance with the great Lexicographer’s definition, ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’; the conditions being that we shall do honour to the immortal memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson by supping together four times a year, and by swallowing as much beefsteak pudding, punch, and tobacco smoke as the strength of each man’s constitution admits. A few of the weaker brethren—among whom unhappily I am included—whose bodily infirmity cannot respond to the cheerful Johnsonian cry, ‘Who’s for poonsh?’ do their best to play their part by occasionally reading essays on Johnsonian subjects, and by seasoning their talk with anecdotes and sayings of the great Doctor. We are tolerated by the jovial crew, for they see that we mean well, and are as ‘clubbable’ as nature allows. Our favourite haunt is the OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE, the only tavern in Fleet Street left unchanged by what Johnson called that ‘fury of innovation’ which, beginning with Tyburn and its gallows-tree, has gradually transformed London. The Mitre—‘where he loved to sit up late’; where he made Boswell’s head ache, not with the port wine, but with the sense he put into it; where, at their first supper, he called to him with warmth, ‘Give me your hand, I have taken a liking to you’; where, nearly a century later, Hawthorne, in memory of the two men, dined ‘in the low, sombre coffee-room’—the Mitre has been rebuilt.

“The Cock, most ancient of taverns, has followed its ‘plump head-waiter’ along the road of mortality, although, fortunately, its fittings and furniture are still preserved with the house which, under the same name, has risen on the other side of the street. The Old Cheshire Cheese stands as it stood in the days when Goldsmith used to pass its side door on his way up the dark entry to his lodgings in Wine Office Court. The jolly host who owns the freehold can show title-deeds going back almost to the time of the Great Fire of London.

“There, on the ground floor, we meet our ‘Prior’ sitting on a bench, above which is set in the wall a brass tablet bearing the following inscription:—

“‘The Favourite Seat of
Dr. SAMUEL JOHNSON.
Born September 18, 1709; Died December 13, 1784.

“‘In him a noble understanding and a masterly intellect were united to great independence of character and unfailing goodness of heart, which won the admiration of his own age, and remain as recommendations to the reverence of posterity.

“‘No, sir! there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness has been produced as by a good tavern.—Johnson.’

“In this same room, with its floor as ‘nicely sanded’ as when Goldsmith knew it, our club gathers from time to time; here, undisturbed in our thoughts by a single modern innovation except the gas, we sup on one of those beefsteak puddings for which the Cheshire Cheese has been famous from time immemorial. So vast is it in all its glorious rotundity that it has to be wheeled in on a table; it disdains a successor in the same line, and itself alone satisfies forty hungry guests. ‘A magnificent hot apple pie stuck with bay leaves,’ our second course, recalls the supper with which Johnson ‘celebrated the birth of the first literary child of Mrs. Lennox, the novelist, when at five in the morning his face still shone with meridian splendour though his drink had been only lemonade.’[4] The talk is of the liveliest; from time to time toasts are drunk and responded to.”

The centenary of the death of Dr. Johnson was celebrated in December, 1884, and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of the 20th of that month thus refers to the Doctor’s connection with the ancient hostelry:—“Whoever has heard of the grand old Doctor knows well that the greater part of his life was passed between Ludgate Hill and Temple Bar, and that the most interesting portion of it revolved about Gough Square. There seems to be little doubt that while he lived here, the Old Cheshire Cheese tavern was, as is claimed for it, the haunt which he most favoured, and where much of that sledgehammer wisdom was coaxed forth or teased forth, which Boswell has recorded that, as Macaulay put it, the memory of Johnson might keep alive the fame of his works.”

Many notable men have sat down at the Johnson centenary dinners in the Cheshire Cheese. At that held on December 13, 1894, for example, the chair was taken by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., M.P., then most popularly known as the author of “Obiter Dicta,” but subsequently to become President of the Board of Education and later Chief Secretary for Ireland in a Liberal Government. From the Sketch of December 19, which devoted to this particular festivity a page and half of illustrated literary matter, is taken the following extract:—“The most interesting figure of the evening was undoubtedly Mr. Dobson. His health was proposed just in such a way as it must have been in the days when men of letters indited odes to one another.” Then followed the reading of gentle imitations of Mr. Dobson’s style, but exigency of space precludes our quoting more than a couple of stanzas from a delightful perversion of “The Ladies of St. James’s”:—

THE RHYMERS’ CLUB.

Another club which affected the stern, uncushioned comforts of the “Cheese” was known as the Rhymers’ Club, and we betray no secret when we give the names of the members, for are they not written in the book of their poetic deeds? In this book, published through Elkin Mathews in 1892, the composition of the club is thus recorded: Ernest Dowson, Edwin J. Ellis, G. A. Greene, Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, T. W. Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, W. B. Yeats.

When such sweet singers meet, it may well be believed that the night was ambrosial, care and the world were banished, and the contests of the “Cheese” and of the “Mermaid”—in miniature, it is no discourtesy to say—live again, as Mr. Rhys sings:

A very considerable poet and proseman, Mr. John Davidson, a Scotchman, by the way, from the vicinity of Paisley, in his work, “A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, which Lasted One Night and One Day, with a History of the Pursuit of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm, by Mrs. Scamler and Maud Emblem,” brings two of his characters, Mr. Gurdon and Sir Harry Emblem, into the “Cheese” in a condition which would spell ruin to the landlord were it generally adopted. The two gentlemen had spent some £40 in eight days, and now they are “on the rocks” in a Strand restaurant. But foreigners have hard hearts, and so the delightful couple find their way to the Cap and Bells, which every Fleet Streeter will recognise as the Cheshire Cheese. They order supper, and, though unprepared to pay, are prepared to justify their deeds. They were quite unconventional in the matter of settlement of accounts; they were financially naked, yet they were not ashamed. Fortunately for the landlord, it happens that on this night the Guild of Prosemen (oh, sarcastic Mr. Davidson!), otherwise the Rhymers’ Club, are holding their meeting, and one of the members, acting more like an impulsive poet than a mere proseman, settles their account and introduces them to the club. There we must say farewell to Mr. Davidson’s creations, but we cannot leave the Rhymers without quoting, by the kindness of the author and publisher, the following exquisite:—

BALLADE OF THE CHESHIRE CHEESE
IN FLEET STREET.

Envoi.

“THE 49 CLUB.”

This is a more recent club which met at the “Cheese” to partake, as their “Chronicle” has it, of “a curious mysterie

together with such Olde Ales, Costlie Wines, and strong waters as may suit ye taste, purse, or conscience of ye Members.”

The Chronicle of this club is very diverting, and begins with a motto not from Goethe,

Ein guter Trunk
Macht Alte junk

which is, after all, a very partial and temporary truth. For the guidance of other social clubs I cannot refrain from quoting in extenso the article headed “Rules”:—

“The Rules of the Club being of the sort once heard are never forgotten, there is no need to repeat them in this Chronicle.”

So much for the Forty-niners.

THE SOAKERS’ CLUB.

“We’ll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting days, and moreo’er puddings and flapjacks; and thou shalt be welcome,” was the Shakesperean motto of this frankly christened club. The pious founder of the club, in a finely printed booklet, declared that “it was deemed a requisite that your club should flourish under some rollicking epithet such as had not previously been ‘empounded’ by any other fraternity. The title should be terse; it should also be outrageous. It should smack of the caveau, and have the scent of the beeswing. Accordingly, many have been the creations that have in turn possessed the mind of your promoters. Fuddling clubs, gorging clubs, out Heroding Herod clubs—these comprised a whole hand of clubs, in which was not a single trump. Then did your promoters bethink themselves of that unctuous cognomen, ‘The Soakers.’ The title is a nudity.... The name of ‘The Soakers’ Club’ is selected only as conveying a sharp antithetical travestie upon our sober habits as moderate men.” This last statement is consolatory, for it would have been unpleasant if the club had come to the “Cheese” merely to make manifest their loyalty to their name. They were good fellows, and, though not quite antithetical to their designation did not allow it to run riot with their moderate tendencies. They dined at the “Cheese” regularly for years, but their numbers did not increase, owing probably to the frank brutality of their title, and the natural result was that they gradually dwindled away.

THE ST. DUNSTAN’S CLUB.

No wife, however shrewd, could object to her marital slave being a member of the St. Dunstan’s, while even the most angelic of ladies would scarcely like to see her lord flourishing as a leader among “The Soakers.” Therefore has the St. Dunstan’s flourished like a green bay tree for over a century. Its proud boast is that it has contributed more Common Councilmen and Aldermen (and consequently Lord Mayors) to the Corporation of the City of London than any other club in the Metropolis.

The St. Dunstan’s is pre-eminently a social club, neither party nor religion entering into its management. As may be expected, its members (now limited to twenty-eight) are leading men in their respective walks of life. The St Dunstan’s Club is called after the courageous English saint who, according to tradition, once pulled Satan by the nose with a pair of pincers. This episode in the life of the holy friar is represented on the insignia of the club. The club legend is that St. Dunstan shook the devil all round the boundaries of the parish, and then dropped him in the Temple, hence the origin of the name of the “Devil’s Own” applied to the legal profession, hence also the name of the “Devil” tavern, nearly opposite St. Dunstan’s Church, where the Apollo Club was presided over by Ben Jonson. Fleet Streeters can no longer “go to the Devil,” in the sense of going to any particular tavern, but anyone of respectability may be introduced to Child’s Bank, No. 1 Fleet Street, which stands on the Devil’s site. The bankers preserve in their parlour Jonson’s Latin rules set down for the guidance of the club.

It appears by the Minute Book that the St. Dunstan’s Club was first established at Anderton’s Coffee House on March 10, 1790, by the Rev. Joseph Williamson, the then Vicar of St. Dunstan’s, Mr. Nicholls, of St. Bride’s, Deputy of the South Side of the Ward of Farringdon Without, and some fifteen others, inhabitants of Fleet Street and its immediate vicinity. The club was limited to thirty members, whereof twenty-six were to be inhabitants of the parish, and four gentlemen resident in the ward. A chairman, treasurer, and secretary, were annually elected at the first meeting of the club in the month of October, and the toasts were fixed by resolution to be as follows:—

1st.—The King.

2nd.—The Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the Royal Family.

3rd.—Unanimity to this Parish.

4th.—Prosperity to the Ward.

5th.—The Absent Members.

At the first regular meeting of the club Mr. Brewer, of St. Sepulchre’s, who was the Deputy for the North Side of the Ward, was duly elected a member, and at a meeting held on October 17, 1792, the celebrated John Wilkes, Alderman of the Ward, was unanimously elected an honorary member. The subscription to the club was one guinea per annum, and the principal source of income appears to have been derived from wagers for bottles of wine amongst the members, the annual elections for Common Councilmen in the Ward always producing a good number of bets as to the position of the various members of the club at the declaration of the poll. Wagers were laid about every conceivable thing under the sun, as a few of the following examples will show:—

January 25, 1792.—“Mr. Whipham laid Mr. P. North a gallon of claret that 14 days from this date the 3 per Cent. Consols would be 95 per cent.” Mr. Whipham lost.

January 16, 1793.—“Mr. P. North lays Mr. Hounsom a bottle of wine that he (Mr. P. North) will be in bed before 2 o’clock the next morning (January 17), and Mr. Hounsom lays Mr. P. North that he has lost the above wager.”

June 12, 1793.—“Mr. P. North lays that Mr. Hounsom will not forget to pay Mr. Thorne the 2d. to-morrow in the course of the day which he (Mr. Thorne) had lent and advanced for him to pay the waiter 2d. for a Welsh rarebit which Mr. Hounsom had for his supper.”

January 19, 1793.—“Mr. Thorne reported that Mr. Hounsom had paid him the 2d. at half-past 9 o’clock in the morning.”

June 12, 1793.—“Mr. Lambe and Mr. Dep. Nicholls ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Lambe lays that Mr. Dep. Nicholls knows Miss W——. Upon explanation Mr. Dep. Nicholls lost. Mr. Jones and Mr. J. North ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Jones lays that neither Mr. Lambe nor Mr. Dep. Nicholls knows Miss W——. Mr. Jones lost. Mr. Dep. Nicholls requested that the club would permit him to pay a bottle for having termed Miss W—— Mr. Hounsom’s friend instead of neighbour. Ordered that it be granted. Mr. Lambe and Mr. J. North ‘a bottle.’ Mr. Lambe lays that he (Mr. Lambe) never ran away from a good thing. After some discussion it was decided that Mr. Lambe had lost the bet.”

In 1795 a great number of bets were made about the wearing of hair powder, and the wagering was so keen that counsel’s opinion was taken as to who had won the respective bets; the original opinion and decision of the counsel (Mr. George Bond, of Serjeants’ Inn) is attached to the Minute Book.

It was also the custom of the club to wager on the “first letter” of the King’s or Queen’s Speech after the words “My Lords and Gentlemen.” This naturally afforded great scope for speculation, which, it appears by the minutes, the members were accustomed to take full advantage of. When the funds of the club were low the following among other expedients was adopted:—

February 22, 1792.—“Resolved that any member of this club elected to any office of honour or emolument shall pay for the benefit of the club one bottle of port wine.”

April 8, 1795.—“Mr. Hounsom and Mr. Whipham ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Hounsom lays that the Prince of Wales will not have issue within the space of 12 months. Mr. Fisher and Mr. Williams ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Fisher lays that the Prince of Wales will have issue within the space of 12 months. Mr. Thorne and Mr. George ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Thorne lays that the Princess of Wales will be delivered of a son or daughter within 12 calendar months.”

April 22, 1795.—“Rev. Mr. Williamson and Mr. Ustonson ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Williamson lays that the Princess of Wales is not delivered of a son or daughter within 12 calendar months. Mr. Butterworth and Mr. Piggott ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Butterworth lays that the Prince of Wales will not have issue within 12 months.”

THE LEGITIMIST CLUB.

Before leaving the subject of “Cheese” clubs one more of the many which have enjoyed on occasion the hospitality of the “Cheese” may be mentioned. Most people in this land, and presumably everybody in America, would consider this club somewhat belated. It has an idea that King Edward is a usurper, and that the rightful sovereign of these isles and of the empire is some foreign potentate whom even his own states disown. The following paragraph from the Daily Telegraph of March 25, 1895, will show that whatever we may think of the views of its members, the excellence of their taste in gastronomy cannot be called in question:—

“A few gentlemen are still left in this hasteful, bustling, and forgetful age who have time to remember that James I. ascended the throne of England on March 24, 1603. It is hardly necessary to add that they are members of the Thames Valley Legitimist Club, who spend their leisure in moaning over the extinguished glories of their country since the expulsion of James II. Taking advantage of the fact that yesterday was not only the anniversary of the date just given, but was also Mothering Sunday, when the rigidity of the Lenten fast is temporarily suspended, they dined together last evening in the Old Cheshire Cheese, and after doing justice to the famous Johnsonian puddings and other viands, amused themselves after their wont by inspecting a piece of the scaffold on which some unfortunate followers of the House of Stuart were executed. The health of the Queen was drunk, and it was incidentally mentioned as a fact not generally known that, with two exceptions, every sovereign in Europe was descended from the saintly mother of the monarch whose anniversary they were that day celebrating. The health of Charles VII. of Spain, whoever he may be, was duly honoured.”

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It is a common belief that Fleet Street is dotted with houses which were Dr. Johnson’s homes in later years, and with the taverns in which he sat drinking tea and talking philosophy till the small hours of the morning. It is not so. The Doctor’s house at No. 1 Inner Temple Lane has given way to “Johnson’s Buildings.”

In Johnson’s Court (named after Thomas Johnson, citizen and merchant taylor, and one of the Common Council from 1598 till his death in 1625) the Doctor lived from 1765 to 1776, and during his “journey” in Scotland humorously described himself as “Johnson of that Ilk.” The house (No. 7) has, however, gone the way of all bricks and mortar. In 1776 he removed to No. 8 Bolt Court, where he passed the rest of his life. The house was demolished soon after his death. In fact there is only one house—No. 17 Gough Square—on which we can look and say, “Here dwelt Dr. Johnson.”

Gough Square itself has undergone inevitable alteration, but fortunately for the devotee, at the western end the Doctor’s house, No. 17, still stands intact. Here his wife died in 1752, and here he completed his Dictionary in 1755. In his note book for 1831, Carlyle mentions having paid a visit to the house and interviewed the occupant, who was apparently under the impression that his illustrious predecessor in the tenancy had been a schoolmaster. So he had been, and one of his pupils, a pupil of whom any master might have been proud, was David Garrick. But the tenant knew not that schoolmastering had long been abandoned when the Doctor was compiling his Dictionary in that by no means majestic abode. On the right-hand side of the doorway the Society of Arts has placed a plaque with the following inscription:—

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Among the earlier notices of the “Cheese” which have appeared in newspapers is the following, taken from Common Sense, or, the Englishman’s Journal,[6] of Saturday, April 23, 1737:—

“On Sunday, April 17, one Harper, who formerly lived with Mr. Holyoake at the sign of the ‘Old Cheshire Cheese,’ in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, for eight years, found Means to conceal himself in the House, and early on Monday Morning got into the Room where the Daughter lay, and where Mr. Holyoake (as he well knew) kept his Money; and accordingly he took away a small Box wherein was £200 and Notes to the Value of £600 more. The Child, hearing a Noise, happily awaked, and cry’d out, ‘Mammy, Mammy, a Man has carried away the Box;’ which alarm’d her Father and Mother, who lay near, and immediately they got up; which oblig’d the Fellow to hide himself in the Chimney, where he was discover’d, with the Box carefully ty’d up in a Handkerchief, and being secur’d, was afterwards carried before the Lord Mayor, who committed him to Newgate.”

In the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser of Monday, August 9, 1784, we read an account of an attempted murder at the “Cheese.” It appears that a porter in the Temple named John Gromont induced a woman who had cohabited with, and then deserted him, to accept a drink at a public-house in Wine Office Court, “where, starting up in a fit of frenzy, he cut the woman’s throat.”

“Before the transaction he had made several attempts to destroy himself at Mr. Bosher’s, the Rainbow, opposite the end of Chancery Lane, in Fleet Street, and other public-houses in the neighbourhood.”

Coming to a more recent period, we find the press notices of the “Cheese” increase in frequency. Punch, for April 14, 1864, describes a famous evening at the “Cheese.” Mr. John Cordy Jeaffreson, no mean authority, in his “A Book about the Table,” mentions the “Cheese” as one of the three houses in the immediate neighbourhood of the Inns of Court worthy of comparison with those near St. Paul’s, and so the references go on ever spreading till they cross the Atlantic and even return from the Antipodes.

Considerations of space will only permit a few further quotations from the vast mass of journalistic literature dealing with the subject.

The Kent Examiner and Ashford Chronicle of June 20, 1885, referring to the “Cheese,” says:—“It is very generally believed that Shakespeare was one of its numerous frequenters, but undoubtedly one famous man was, namely—François Marie Arouet, otherwise Voltaire—while often enough were present Bolingbroke, Pope, and Congreve, and it is well known that Rare Ben Jonson was one of its most jolly frequenters. Coming down to more modern times, among the many customers of the house have been Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, Tom Hood, and last, but not least, Thackeray and Dickens.”

In “A Walk up Fleet Street,” which appeared in the Sunday Times, the following passage occurs:—“The Cheshire Cheese is not imposing in appearance, nor is it even to be seen from the street. Two little courts lead to its somewhat dingy portals; portals much frequented by the London correspondents of provincial journals and gallery reporters. More or less throughout every day of the week barristers and journalists—even members of Parliament are not always missing—come to this house for their dinner, and sit contentedly round the sides of two good old-fashioned rooms. But it is on Saturday that the Cheshire Cheese is seen at its best. Then it is that ‘rump-steak pudding’ makes its appearance; announced all the week, anxiously expected, come at last!”

The Reporter, of October 28, 1874, says of the “Cheese”:—

“We have occasionally used this old-fashioned house for over a quarter of a century, and can conscientiously assert that for its chops and steaks, cold beef and salad, and marvellous rump-steak pudding, and for the alacrity with which these edibles are supplied the establishment is unmatchable in the metropolis. Besides, the malt liquors are of the strongest and the best brew, and the whiskies are mellow and old; whilst the ancient punch, which is served exactly as compounded in the days of Dr. Johnson, is simply nectar worthy of elevating even the gods.”

Under the heading “Some Gossip about Famous Taverns,” a writer in the Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette says:—

“What man who has ever been called into Fleet Street, either on business or pleasure, does not know the sawdusted floor and old-time appointments of the Cheshire Cheese? Who would dare to confess ignorance of the Brobdingnagian chops, the world-famous point steaks, the stewed cheese, which constitute its main attractions all the year round? Who has not here devoted himself during the hot summer months, in the cool dining-room which seems ever impervious to the sun’s rays, to the manufacture of an elaborate salad to enjoy with his cold beef? And who, again, has never yet been so fortunate as to witness that appetising procession to be seen every Saturday during the winter months, when Mr. Moore, the master of the house, in dress coat clad, and armed with a mighty carver, precedes into the room that mighty steak and oyster pudding, the secret of whose manufacture has never been allowed to penetrate beyond the mazes of Wine Office Court.”

And again the same writer observes:—“The secret of the success of the Cheshire Cheese is that everything sold within its doors is good. For this we prefer its sanded floors to marble halls, for this we listen curiously to the weird cry of the waiter up the crooked staircase of ‘Rudderhumbake,’ which, by old experience, we know heralds the approach of a choice cut from the mighty rump of a succulent shorthorn or an Aberdeen steer.”

The Philadelphia Times of October, 1884, thus refers to the “Cheese”:—

“A famous man who haunted the ‘Cheese’ was Voltaire, side by side with Bolingbroke, Pope, and Congreve, and there is to-day an old play in manuscript in Scotland, written in Rare Ben Jonson’s day, in which these lines occur:—

A reviewer in the City Press (October 30, 1875) says:—“Ben Jonson loved the ‘Cheese’; and at one time you had only to walk into a Fleet Street coffee-house to become familiar with all the choice spirits of the age. Dean Swift, Addison, and Steele affected the tavern; so did Sheridan, and so did Lord Eldon, and so, indeed, did all men of mark down to our own time.”

An article headed:—

in the Fort Worth (Texas) Daily Gazette opens as follows:—

“While I am on the subject of ‘food’ I must be permitted to mention that I enjoyed the privilege of partaking of ‘ye rumpe steake puddinge’ a few days since at no less celebrated board than ‘The Cheese,’ Wine Office Court, Fleet Street. ‘The Cheese,’ or, to give it its full title, ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,’ is now the most historical tavern of all the old taverns in London. Nearly all the other taverns have had to make way for the more modern restaurant or public-house. Little is known, it seems, of the very early history of the place. A brochure entitled ‘Round London,’ published in 1725, describes the house as ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese tavern, near ye Flete Prison, an eating house for goodly fare.’ And now in 1883, or very near the beginning of the year 1884, I can bear cheerful witness to the fact that it still deserves to be classed with the very few public places in London where one can secure ‘goodly fare.’ The rump-steak pudding, which is the special feature of the place, is certainly toothsome, and is not apt to be speedily forgotten by the epicure. It has been served promptly at one o’clock p.m. every Saturday ‘since when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary,’ and the particular one that I assisted to dissect was enjoyed by quite a hundred persons. Though nominally a ‘steak pudding,’ there are very many other ingredients in the dish than rump steak. It is said that for more than 200 years the old tavern has changed hands but twice, and that it is now in the hands of the third family that has helped to keep up its ancient reputation. It is also said that the recipe by which the pudding is builded is a secret that belongs to the place, and is as sacred an heirloom as the old oil painting of Henry Todd, who, according to the inscription on the portrait, commenced waiter at the ‘Old Cheshire Cheese’ February 17, 1812. This picture was, according to the inscription again, ‘painted by Wageman, July, 1827, subscribed for by the gentlemen frequenting the coffee-room, and presented to Mr. Dolamore (the landlord) in trust, to be handed down as a heirloom to all future landlords of the Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.’”

“Henry Todd, ‘Old’ Harry as he was familiarly called by the visitors, had made a considerable sum of money while in his situation,” writes the compiler of the great work on which the British Museum so prides itself, “Signs of Taverns,” “but I am informed that a spendthrift son reduced his circumstances much. To a stranger he appears a morose, cynical kind of man, apparently not by any means adapted for the waitership of a tavern, although he is always attentive to the wants of his customers. Perhaps he was a different being when younger, and to those who were old customers of the house and who knew him well, he used more freedom probably.

“The portrait, I am informed, is the first attempt in oil by that exceedingly talented artist Wageman, and was painted at the instigation of a visitor to the house, a Mr. Thomas Morell, a well-known pen and quill dealer who resided in the Broadway, Ludgate Hill (a brother of the Morell also pen and ink dealer in Fleet Street), and who was well known to the public for his eccentricity by the name of Peculiar Tom Morell, from the singularity of his puffs and advertisements.”

“Old Harry” retired soon after the portrait-painting from age and infirmity, but was alive at Christmas, 1838.

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The “Diner Out,” in the Evening Standard of January 10, 1867, writes:—

“In each of the apartments on the ground floor is a full-length portrait, in oil, of a departed waiter—subscribed for upon his retirement by the gentlemen ‘using’ the house. The one which most strikes my memory at the moment is the representation of a portly, respectable—scrupulously respectable—middle-aged man, clad in a costume worn early in the century—that is to say, the coat is of blue, the buttons are gilt, the cravat is a cheerful roll surmounting a frilled shirt, and the legs know no trousers but the breeches and stockings of departed days, when well-made men ‘stood upon their legs’ in something more than the merely literal sense of the term. The background of the picture is a faithful representation of a section of the room in which it is hung. The box before which the waiter is standing, opening a bottle of port (I say port, because a man would never open a bottle of sherry with the same grave, but complacent, air of responsibility), is a speaking likeness, and so is evidently the representation of the guest for whom the order is being executed—a person even more respectable than the waiter, if possible, with a very high coat collar, his hair all brushed up to the top of his head, and a cute knowledge of wine depicted in every lineament of his countenance. You may be sure that no inferior quality is being opened for him. Indeed, the waiter is as incapable of deceiving as the guest of being deceived. The wine is evidently of that degree of excellence which impels people to talk about it while they drink it—a wine which is its own aim and end—not a mere stimulating drink, setting men on to be enthusiastic upon general subjects. The diner is plainly the model diner of the Cheshire Cheese, as the waiter is the model waiter.

“The Cheshire Cheese is famous for steak-pudding, agreeably tempered by kidneys, larks, and oysters. This dish, which is often ordered for private parties, and even for private houses, is frequently made the occasion of social gatherings of an extensive character—so much so, indeed, that Madame Roland might have extended her celebrated apostrophe to Liberty by saying—‘O Steak Pudding, how much conviviality is committed in thy name!’ Whatever you get at the ‘Cheshire’ is sure to be good and capitally cooked.”

From an article entitled “At the Cheshire Cheese,” which appeared in the Commercial Travellers’ Review, the following is taken:—“At one o’clock—the time at which the ‘Cheese’ is most frequented—we accompanied our friends up Fleet Street, and then by devious ways and turnings, more than enough to upset our geography, until we finally arrived at that part of Wine Office Court where the ‘Cheshire’ stands. We were ushered into what seemed most like the after cabin of a steamer, with comfortably arranged and well appointed miniature tables on either side, attended by trim obliging waiters, and everything else equally inviting, and fully justifying our friend’s previous good report. ‘Roast Lamb,’ ‘Roast Beef,’ ‘Boiled Beef,’ ‘Beefsteak Pie,’ and——‘Thanks—plates for four of the first with the various &c., and four tankards of stout.’ ‘Yes, sir’—and away vanishes our excellent friend, the waiter, to the unknown regions where cook holds sway and reigns supreme, only to return in less time than it takes to record the fact, with all that was calculated to make us content and comfortable.... We enjoyed one of the pleasantest afternoons it has been our good fortune to participate in for many a day. Pleasant dinner—pleasant company over a well-brewed bowl of palatably flavoured sipping punch, that engendered pleasant reflections on past assemblies and present associations—in the heart of dear old London—surely no alloy was possible in our midst, and nothing more was needed save the presence of some other far away friends to overflow the cup of pleasure at the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’”

In the World of December 24, 1884, there is an article on the “The Old Chop Houses,” in which the writer, drawing on the recollections of thirty years, says: “There was only one other house that excelled the old Cheshire Cheese for a steak, and that was the Blue Posts in Cork Street.... But as regards mutton, chops, the Cheshire Cheese was unrivalled in London, or anywhere short of Barnsley, where a mutton chop is about a third part of a loin, not reckoning the chump end, and where this doubled or trebled chop is so taperly trimmed and freed from its superfluous fat, that when cooked, by a process which I take to be rather roasting than grilling, and served with the fillet under, like a sirloin of beef, it might, by virtue of its shapely plumpness, be taken for a roast partridge or grouse.”

Under the head of “Public Refreshment,” in Knight’s “London,” vol. iv., p. 314, appears this passage:—

“There is a dingy house in a court in Fleet Street where the chops and steaks are unrivalled. Who that has tasted there that impossible thing of private cookery, a hot mutton chop—a second brought when the first is despatched—has not pleasant recollections of the never-ending call to the cook of ‘two muttons to follow’?”

In Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” (book ii., chap. 4), after the trial at the Old Bailey, the text proceeds:

“‘I begin to think I am faint.’

“‘Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined, myself, while those numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this or some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.’

“Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern.[7] Here they were shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine; while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and his fully half-insolent manner upon him.”

“Jeems Pipes, of Pipesville,” in a letter dated from Regent Street, London, June 26, 1879, to the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, thus refers to the Cheshire Cheese:—

“The Old Cheshire Cheese is, perhaps, at the present writing, one of the most popular of the old hostelries, and when you consider that for over two hundred years it has been in existence, and has been patronised by celebrities of every degree, rank, and station, and even royalty—for Charles II. ate a chop here with Nell Gwynne—and the genial landlord will actually show you the seats used by Dr. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, even to the marks on the wainscotted wall made by their greased wigs; the corner where the author of ‘Pendennis’ and ‘The Newcomes’ sat, or where Charles Dickens, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Douglas Jerrold, John Leech, and a host of others enjoyed their ’arf-and-’arf and toasted cheese. The tavern is situated up a little narrow passage called

‘WINE OFFICE COURT.’

I don’t think it can be more than three feet wide. On the right hand side of it is the entrance. Over the door is a glass lamp painted red, with the words ‘Old Cheshire Cheese’ on it. But, oh! what chops, what steaks, what cold lamb and salad, what beefsteak pudding you do get here! It is indeed a revelation! And should you be permitted to ascend to the upper part of the building you will find the walls adorned with paintings, articles of vertu, and other evidences of comfort and ease, where the proprietor dispenses his hospitality in the most genial manner; and, when I inform you that Mr. Moore is a vestryman and churchwarden of St. Bride’s, will shortly become Councilman, and probably Alderman and Lord Mayor, you will see that it is no common thing to be the landlord of the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’”

Mr. Moore did not live to attain the dignity of Lord Mayor which “Jeems Pipes” presaged. He died in 1886, loved and respected in his life, and deeply lamented at his death by the troops of friends who knew him both in his private and business life.

The following are extracted from a London letter in the New York World of September 14, 1884, and are interesting:—

“London abounds in historic taverns, but of them all none are more historic and interesting than the ‘Cheese.’ To eat a steak here is not to masticate fried cork, while the tankards of bitter ale, foaming and delicious, with which you wash down the steak are worth a long journey to enjoy. The folk-lore of this famous haunt is interesting, not alone to tavern-loving, but to general posterity, although as to a complete and detailed account of its very early history there is much of obscurity. While there are no positive proofs, there are authentic legends that Shakespeare spent many an idle hour at this place, because it was on his way to the Blackfriars’ Theatre, in Playhouse Yard, Ludgate Hill, of which he was so long a time absolute manager. In his time the play began at 1 p.m. and ended at 5 p.m., at which hour the wits of the town mustered forces in Fleet Street haunts.

“In modern times, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and now to-day that prince of diners and bons vivants, George Augustus Sala, have frequented the Cheshire Cheese and waxed eloquent over its comforts and subtle charms. Both Dickens and Thackeray knew how to appreciate a good inn, and, after singing the praises of the bill of fare, pay deserved compliments to the waiters. Men who serve the frequenters of the Cheshire grow gray in the service, and each boasts his own particular customers. Of the younger waiters all are most civil, and the young women at the bar are not only polite, but lady-like in manners and appearance.

“It is surprising how soon one gets used to the innovation of the feminine bar-tender, and it is not to be questioned that it is a good custom, productive of greater refinement among the male frequenters, and, where the young women conduct themselves modestly, in no wise degrading to their minds or morals.

“It matters little what hour you select to visit ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,’ you will have plenty to amuse and instruct you, and always find the pretty barmaids in the bar room attentive and clever. The cutting of the rump-steak and kidney pie is a spearing process performed by the proprietor, and often as many as three, even four waiters are needed to lift the huge smoking hot pie to the centre table, while often from thirty to sixty hungry men wait at the various tables for a triangle of this toothsome viand. Take my word for it, you will have a great desire for a second help, and even though, like myself, you are a petticoat wearer, no one will annoy you or even look surprised at your devoting an evening among the odd masculine characters nightly frequenting ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.’”

In an article written by Mr. W. Outram Tristram, and illustrated by Mr. Herbert Railton, the English Illustrated Magazine of December, 1889, gives, under the title of “A Storied Tavern,” a most interesting account of this old house.

“Here,” says the writer, “is no home for kickshaws and cigarettes. From this kitchen comes no sample of fashionable culinary art, that ‘art with poisonous honey stolen from France.’ Nothing of that kind obtains at the Cheshire Cheese. Here the narrowed kingdom lies of point steaks turned to a second and served hissing on plates supernaturally hot, of chops gargantuan in size and inimitable in tenderness and flavour, of cheese bubbling sympathetically in tiny tins, of floury potatoes properly cooked, of tankards of bitter beer, of extra creaming stout, of a rump-steak and oyster pudding served on Saturdays only,[8] and so much the specialty of the house, that I must deal with it hereafter. All smacks here of that England of solid comfort and solid plenty.

“There is a collection of useful

IMPLEMENTS OF INEBRIETY

in the bar of the Cheshire Cheese, which brings the place’s past more vividly, perhaps, before one than any view of its sanded floors, low ceilings, or quaint staircase, disappearing suddenly from the entrance passage in formal but inviting bend.

“Voltaire was certainly here; Bolingbroke, in this place cracked many a bottle of Burgundy; and Congreve’s wit flashed wine-inspired, while Pope, sickly and intolerant of tobacco-smoke, suffered under these low roofs I doubt not many a headache. But it is of its distinguished visitors of later days that the Cheshire Cheese as it now stands reminds one most fully. Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Chatterton were undoubted frequenters. Many a time the great Samuel, turning heavily in his accustomed seat, and beset by some pert sailing pinnace, brought, like a galleon manœuvring, his ponderous artillery to bear. Goldsmith lived at No. 6 Wine Office Court, where he wrote or partly wrote the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ his flagging inspiration possibly gaining assistance from the tavern’s famed Madeira.

“His (Dr. Johnson’s) frequent, nay, nightly visits here are matters of history, and have been vouched for on

AUTHORITY BEYOND DISPUTE.

The time is not so far distant when old frequenters to the house were to be found who had drunk and eaten with men whom Johnson had conversationally annihilated, and who recalled the circumstance with an extreme clearness of recollection. A recollection this which joined the record of two generations of the tavern’s great visitors. And the second generation offered names not unworthy to compare with the first, such notabilities as these figuring in the list: Dickens, Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, John Forster, Sir Alexander Cockburn, Professor Aytoun, Tom Hood, Andrew Halliday, and Charles Mathews.”

Miss Sarah Morton, a special correspondent of the Illustrated Buffalo Express (N.Y.), gives in her paper, February 15, 1891, an amusing report of her visit to the “Cheese.” “It was,” she says, “with slow and lingering steps that I emerged from a visit to the ghastly yet fascinating Tower of London, by the way of old St. Paul’s Churchyard into Fleet Street, towards the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’ ’Twas the night of the beefsteak pudding, a delicacy served only twice a week, and in precisely the same way that it has been served in this very place for 200 years.

---

“One feels just like sidling into an old-fashioned church pew, for the three tables on the left, each accommodating six persons, are provided with high-backed benches black with age.

“‘Will you wait for the pudding?’ asks the Imposing Personage.

“‘What time will it come on?’ I diffidently query.

“‘Six o’clock to the minute,’ was the answer.

“‘I will wait,’ I replied, and again I was left alone to continue my observations.

“Over on the broad window seat is something under glass in a gilt frame. It is a most glowing description of the glories of ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,’ written by Jeems Pipes of Pipesville.

“Every seat is occupied.

“’Tis just six.

“The door swings slowly open. A huge, round white ball is borne aloft, high above the head of The Personage, who enters with slow and stately tread, followed in single file by six serious-faced attendants. The salver is tenderly lowered, and rests upon the table. Every eye is fixed upon it. The room is pervaded with perfect hush.

“The Personage solemnly receives a big spoon and knife from his first gentleman in waiting. The fateful moment has arrived. The pastry is broken. The gravy gently oozes over it.

“The Personage gravely approaches me and apologises for not serving me first, but ‘really the middle portion will be safer for you,’ he explained.

“The plates of the others were heaped upon. My time has come. There is my big dinner plate piled high with—what on earth! Birds! yes, tiny bits of birds, skylarks, kidneys, strips of beef, just smothered in pastry like sea-foam, and dark brown gravy, steaming with fragrance, as seasoning.

“‘Half-and-half’—British bitter and stout in old-time pewter mugs was brought; out of deference to my sex, I suppose, a glass tumbler was placed before me, but I scorned to use it. Didn’t Thackeray say it was worth a year’s absence in far-away countries to realise the joy that filled one’s soul upon returning to old England and quaffing her bitter from a pewter mug?

“Then came stewed cheese, on the thin shaving of crisp, golden toast in hot silver saucers—so hot that the cheese was of the substance of thick cream, the flavour of purple pansies and red raspberries commingled.

“There were only 400 skylarks put into the pudding made for the Prince of Wales at the banquet of the Forth Bridge opening in Edinburgh. How many thousands of the ‘blithe spirits’ have been put into the Cheshire Cheese pudding for 200 years?

“Shades of Shelley and Keats!”

In Society a series of articles was devoted to the description of famous restaurants and of the fare to be enjoyed within their walls. The writer, long an intimate of the “Cheese,” devotes not the least piquant of his descriptions to that immortal house. He writes: “Christopher North chopped here, and has recorded his high opinion of its kitchen and its cellar. I fancy, however, that it was about the early Punch period that its real connection with journalism was ratified and the union consummated. Shirley Brooks has written pleasantly about it, Albert Smith has chaffed it, Edmund Yates has embalmed it in his ‘Reminiscences,’ and I have always had an idea that the Fleet Street chop-house in which poor Sydney Carton is found sitting in a semi-drunken condition is the Cheshire Cheese. Dickens, at all events, knew this place well, nor was it likely to escape a use of this sort. Mr. George Augustus Sala was a constant customer.”

The Freemason’s Chronicle of June 5, 1886, in reviewing an earlier edition of this little book, says:—“The praises of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, one of the most antiquated, and yet the most favourite, resorts in the city of London, have been sung by historians and poets through the whole of the last century, and quaint stories have been handed down to us of scenes and incidents that have from time to time been enacted within the age-begrimed walls of this historic ‘chop-house.’ In these days of progress, when the links connecting us with the bygone history of Old London are being snapped one by one, and once familiar landmarks are being improved off the face of the City by modern innovations, it is refreshing to be able to sit down and con over the sayings and doings of eminent men who have left ‘footprints on the sands of Time,’ and whose names are immortalised in literature and song. This little volume brings us tête-à-tête with such sturdy intellects as those of Dr. Johnson, Boswell, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Burke, and a host of other ‘men of the time,’ who in their periods of leisure sought ease and refreshment at the ‘Cheese,’ and set the tables often in a roar with their pungent criticisms and flights of mirth and satire.

“You can have pointed out to you the seats used by Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, even to the marks on the wainscoted walls made by their greased wigs; the corner where the author of ‘Pendennis’ and the ‘Newcomes’ sat; or where Charles Dickens, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Douglas Jerrold, John Leech, and a host of others enjoyed their ’arf-and-’arf and toasted cheese. The ‘Cheese’ has still its habitués and on Saturday there is the famous rump-steak pudding, which draws a large attendance, for it is considered that you may search the wide world round without matching that succulent delicacy. Although we miss the genial form and face of the late Moore, whose prerogative it was to preside over this chef-d’œuvre of the culinary art, yet his place is filled by a worthy scion of the race, and the company, if not so garrulous or so boisterous as of yore, is still permeated by a sense of deep and affectionate loyalty to the ‘old shop.’”

The Globe of September 23, 1887, says: “London itself bristles with associations of the great dead. The toil and moil of Fleet Street has tired you. Then turn up Wine Office Court and enter the Cheshire Cheese, where you may sit in the same seat, perchance drink out of the same glass, and if, like poor Oliver, you still ask for more, it is possible to rest your head on the identical spot of grease that Johnson’s wig provoked on the bare wall.”

---

“The Field of Art” (“Scribner”), Feb. 1897:

“There is no date recorded of the building of the ‘Cheese,’ but for over two hundred years it has been in existence, and has been patronised by celebrities of every degree. Charles II. ate a chop there with Nell Gwynne. A brass tablet in one corner informs you that this was the favourite seat of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the panelling immediately below is quite polished by the heads of generations of the faithful who have held it an honour to occupy the seat....

“Along Fleet Street nineteenth century humanity rushes in throngs, feverishly intent on the main chance. But now and again units from the mass fall out and disappear into a little doorway, so unobtrusive in its character as to be easily passed by strangers in search of it. A small passageway, a bit of court, and one enters the Old Cheshire Cheese, treading in the footsteps of generations of wits and philosophers. A wit the visitor may not be, but he is certain to be the other in one way or another, and his purpose in coming here can have little in common with the hurly-burly he has but just left out there in Fleet Street. The tide of affairs has left him stranded on an oasis of peculiar charm—a low-ceilinged room, brown as an old meerschaum, heavily raftered, and carrying to the sensitive nostril the scent of ages, the indescribable aroma inseparable from these haunts of geniality: the merry glow of the fire in the old grate, flirting tiny flames upwards that caress the steaming, singing kettle hanging just above. The old copper scuttle glints with the fitful gleams upon its burnished pudgy sides; the floor spread abundantly with sawdust softens the sounds of footfalls. The white tablecloths make the note of tidiness relieving the prevailing low tone of the room.... The silk hats and trousers of modern London almost seem out of harmony with the cosy quaintness of their environment; but smalls and buckles, and cocked hats pass away, and architecture survives the fashions and persons of its creators.

“The waiter before one looks very different from the picture on the wall of his one-time predecessor, but, what is important, the spirit remains the same. In an atmosphere of good fellowship the frequenters of to-day converse over their chop and pint, or perhaps before the cheery fire nurse their knees in reflective mood, drawn together by the same instincts that animated this delightful company of old.

“But who among these, if appealed to, could define the æsthetic charm of the place? Is it the rich colouring of yellow, and old gold, and silver, and brown, the traditions mellow as old wine that sweeten the atmosphere, the satisfaction of the senses, the pure contentment of soul, the pause by the way for the furbishing of one’s mental apparel? It is all these and more that make the Old Cheshire Cheese a delight, and, when one has gone, leaves of its high-backed benches and polished tables, its general aspect of warm and cheery hospitality, a glowing memory.”

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“Chambers’s Journal,” Saturday, June 2, 1883, after speaking of an imaginary journey from Temple Bar eastward, thus describes the “Cheese”:

“There is another old City tavern where Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith often sat together over a snug dinner, a tavern in Wine Office Court called the Old Cheshire Cheese. Passing along Fleet Street and glancing up this court, those magic words seem to take up all the space in the distance as completely as though they were being glanced at through a telescope, and if you follow the instincts of your nature you will dive down the telescope towards the attractive lamp above the door, and enter the tavern. The customary pint of stout in an old pewter will be placed before you, if your taste lies that way; and when you have finished your chop, or steak, or pudding as the case may be, there will follow that speciality for which the Cheshire Cheese is principally noted, a dish of bubbling and blistering cheese, which comes up scorching in an apparatus resembling a tin of Everton toffee in size and shape.

“It was the same when frequented by Johnson and Goldsmith, and their favourite seats in the north-east corner of the window are still pointed out. Nothing is changed—except the waiters, in course of nature—in this conservative and cosy tavern. If Goldsmith did not actually write parts of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ in that corner, he must have thought out more chapters than one while seated there. He lived in Wine Office Court, and here it is supposed the novel begun at Canonbury Tower was finished.”

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“Picturesque London” (Percy Fitzgerald):

“Fleet Street, interesting in so many ways, is remarkable for the curious little courts and passages into which you make entry under small archways. These are Johnson’s Court, Bolt Court, Racquet Court, and the like. But in Fleet Street there is one that is specially interesting. We can fancy the Doctor tramping up to his favourite tavern, the Cheshire Cheese.

“Passing into the dark alley known as Wine Office Court, we come to a narrow flagged passage, the house or wall on the other side quite close and excluding the light. The ‘Cheese’ looks indeed a sort of dark den, an inferior public-house, its grimed windows like those of a shop, which we can look at from the passage. On entering, there is the little bar facing us, and always the essence of snugness and cosiness; to the right a small room, to the left a bigger one. This is the favourite tavern, with its dingy walls and sawdusted floor, a few benches put against the wall, and two or three plain tables of the rudest kind. The grill is heard hissing in some back region where the chop or small steak is being prepared; and it may be said en passant that the flavour and treatment of the chop and steak are quite different from those ‘done’ on the more pretentious grills which have lately sprung up. On the wall is the testimonial portrait of a rather bloated waiter—Todd, I think, by name—quite suggestive of the late Mr. Liston. He is holding up his corkscrew of office to an expectant guest, either in a warning or exultant way, as if he had extracted the cork in a masterly style. Underneath is an inscription that it was painted in 1812, to be hung up as an heirloom and handed down, having been executed under the reign of Dolamore, who then owned the place. Strange to say, the waiter of the Cheshire Cheese has been sung, like his brother at the Cock, but not by such a bard. There is a certain irreverence, but the parody is a good one:

“It has its habitués, and on Saturday there is a famous rump-steak pudding which draws a larger attendance, for it is considered that you may search the wide world round without matching that succulent delicacy. These great savoury meat puddings do not kindle the ardour of many persons, being rather strong for the stomachs of babes.

“Well, then, hither it was that Dr. Johnson used to repair. True, neither Boswell nor Hawkins, nor after them Mr. Croker, takes note of the circumstances, but there were many things that escaped Mr. Croker, diligent as he was. There is, however, excellent evidence of the fact. A worthy solicitor named Jay—who is garrulous, but not unentertaining in a book of anecdotes which he has written—frequented the Cheshire Cheese for fifty years during which long tavern life he says, ‘I have been interested in seeing young men when I first went there who afterwards married; then in seeing their sons dining there, and often their grandsons, and much gratified by observing that most of them succeeded well in life. This applies particularly to the barristers with whom I have so often dined when students, when barristers, and some who were afterwards judges.’”

Mr. Fitzgerald then goes on to quote from Jay the extract given in an earlier chapter, and concludes by saying, “Be that as it may, it is an interesting locality and a pleasing sign—the Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, which will afford the present generation, it is hoped, for some time to come an opportunity of witnessing the kind of tavern in which our forefathers delighted to assemble for refreshment.”

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G. A. S. (“Twice Round the Clock: Six P.M.”) (talking of the ancient Roman repasts): “Better I take it, a mutton chop at the Cheshire Cheese than those nasty ancient Roman repasts.”

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The “Gentleman’s Magazine,” April, 1895 (“A Six Days’ Tour in London with a Pretty Cousin”):—

“We must take a glance at a tavern of the good old pattern close by, which has a regular pedigree and has had books written about it—the Cheshire Cheese to wit. We go up Wine Office Court and there it stands with its blinking windows and somewhat shaky walls.... Not so, Mr. Sylvanus Urban, the windows of the good old house may blink, but there is nothing shaky about the walls, they at all events are founded on a rock solid as the credit of the house. No wonder too, for it carries its two hundred years or so bravely enough, and like its extinct neighbour, the Cock, witnessed the Plague and Fire. It is needless to say that the older Cheshire Cheese perished in the Fire of London, which stopped about a hundred yards west of Wine Office Court, just on the City side of St. Dunstan’s Church. Here the floor is sanded—or rather sawdusted; here are boxes and rude tables; the chop is done on a gridiron before you, and there is a beefsteak pudding which delights epicures.”

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Walter Thornbury (“Old and New London”):

“Goldsmith appears to have resided at No. 6 Wine Office Court from 1760 to 1762. They still point out Johnson and Goldsmith’s favourite seats in the north-east corner of the window of that cosy though utterly unpretentious tavern, the Cheshire Cheese in this court.

“It was while living in Wine Office Court that Goldsmith is supposed to have partly written that delightful novel, the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ which he had begun at Canonbury Tower. We like to think that seated in the ‘Cheese’ he perhaps espied and listened to the worthy but credulous vicar and his gosling son attending to the profound theories of the learned and philosophic but shifty Mr. Jenkinson. We think now, by the windows, with a cross light upon his coarse Irish features and his round prominent brow, we see the watchful poet sit eyeing his prey, secretly enjoying the grandiloquence of the swindler and the admiration of the honest country parson.”

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Mr. Lewis Hough, in “Once a Week,” Oct. 26, 1867:

“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”:

“The faithful journey to the Cheshire Cheese firm in the belief that when Goldsmith lived hard by in Wine Office Court the two friends must have spent many an hour together in those panelled rooms and have sat on the seat assigned to them by tradition. Now that the Cock has quitted his original home, though under his former proprietor” (it must be remembered this was written in 1890, and does not hold at present—he crows gallantly over the way) “the Cheshire Cheese is unquestionably the most perfect specimen of an old-fashioned tavern in London.”

John Cordy Jeaffreson (“A Book about the Table,” vol. ii. page 43):

“But ere we pass from beef to less majestic delicacies, let us render homage to the steak pudding, than which no goodlier fare can be found for a strong hungry man on a cold day. Rising from his pudding at the Cheshire Cheese, such a feaster is at a loss to say whether he should be most grateful for the tender steak, savoury oyster, seductive kidney, fascinating lark, rich gravy, ardent pepper, or delicate paste.”

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“Scribner” (“In London with Dickens”), March, 1881:

“These noisy and nasty eating-houses” (in and about Chancery Lane) “are in striking contrast with the staid old-fashioned taverns in the same neighbourhood, the Cheshire Cheese, etc.”

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“The tavern,” says Sir Walter Besant (in “Fifty Years Ago”), “We can hardly understand how large a place it filled in the lives of our forefathers, who did not live scattered about in suburban villas, but over their shops and offices. When business was over, all, of every class, repaired to the tavern. Dr. Johnson spent the evenings of his last years wholly at the tavern; the lawyer, the draper, the grocer, even the clergyman, all spent their evenings at the tavern, going home in time for supper with their families. The Cheshire Cheese is a survival; the Cock, until recently, was another. And when one contrasts the cold and silent coffee-room of the new great club, where the men glare at each other, with the bright and cheerful tavern where every man talked with his neighbour, and the song went round, and the great kettle bubbled upon the hearth, one feels that civilisation has its losses.”

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Mark Lemon (“Punch”):

“LINES WRITTEN AT THE ‘CHEESE.’

“DEDICATED TO LOVELACE.

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