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CHAPTER XII

FLEET STREET AND

"THE COCK” TAVERN

LEET STREET and its tortuous by-alleys were for hundreds of years famous for its taverns. Here not

only the wits and gourmands of the day made merry, but within their hospitable walls could be found at all hours of the day, and most of those of the night, men of note and quality.

"The coffee house," to quote Macaulay, "was the Londoner's home, and those who wished to find a gentleman, commonly asked whether he frequented the

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Grecian or the Rainbow."

Of these but few remain. Of many only their sites are known. All of them, however, are remembered because they were the haunts of men whose names are household words to-day. In the Devil's Tavern, we hear of Swift dining with Dr. Garth and Addison, Garth treating; and of Dr. Johnson presiding at a supper party which was given to Mrs. Charlotte Lenox, in honour of the publication of her first novel, "The Life of Harriet Stuart."

"The supper was elegant," so runs the chronicle, "and Johnson had directed that a magnificent hot apple-pie

ess.

should make a part of it; and this he would have stuck with bay leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lenox was an authorAbout five (A. M.) Johnson's face shone with meridian splendour, though his drink had been only lemonade. The dawn of day began to put us in mind of our reckoning; but the waiters were all so overcome with sleep that it was two hours before a bill could be had, and it was not until near eight that the creaking of the street door gave the signal for our departure."

The famous Kit-Kat Club stood in Shire Lane. Here, in Queen Anne's reign, thirty-nine young noblemen and gentlemen attached to the House of Hanover were wont to "sleep away the days and drink away the nights."

Hard by was the Bible Tavern, which was appropriately chosen by Jack Sheppard for many of his orgies, for it was possessed of a trap-door leading to a subterranean passage.

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The Rainbow-the second to be opened in London dated as far back as 1637. Here its proprietor, a certain James Farr, a barber, was, in 1657, prevented by the Parish from "makinge and sellinge of a drinke called coffee, whereby in making the same he annoyeth his neighbours by evil smells."

"Dicks" — now an Italian restaurant found at No. 8 entered by a passage.

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may still be

"The Cock" alone survives-one of the few ancient taverns remaining unaltered internally from the time of James I. The outside fell into the clutches of the Demon of Unrest in 1887, and was sent to the dumping ground to make room for what Hare calls "a ludicrous Temple Bar Memorial." But the inside fittings were rescued bodily,

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carried across Fleet Street, and set up in its new home, No. 22, a short distance from its old site at 201- not a renovation, nor a patching up, nor making one half of it new to match the old, but the putting together in a new room, the size of the old one, everything that the old one had contained. The old Jacobean fireplace, with its grate, mantel, fender and fire tongs and shovel, was set up intact; the same old settees were placed in the same relative positions as at No. 201; the same old prints and sketches, and in the same frames, were hung in their old panels on the walls, and the same cheap gas jets fastened to the well-smoked ceilingto-day a quarter of a century old. Even now much of the old pewter, crockery, and glass can be found on the timeworn shelving, while the floor, as in the old days, is bare of a carpet, and the time-honoured tables still smile back at you from out of the polish made and kept bright by the elbows of a hundred celebrities.

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It was to one of these very tables that Pepys, to his wife's great aggravation, conducted the pretty Mrs. Knipp, and here they drank, ate a lobster, and sang and were "mighty merry till almost midnight."

On another table Tennyson wrote "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," beginning:

"O plump head waiter at The Cock,

To which I most resort,

How goes the time? 'Tis five o'clock.

Go fetch a pint of port."

At still another table Thackeray was accustomed to take his chop and stout-it being but a step from Punch's

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