CHAPTER FIFTH

REAT changes have come upon Took's Court with the run of years, but some of the old houses that the Nephew saw when he went there in 1828, at the conclusion of the Chiswick partner

ship, still stand on the eastern side, so that we can easily imagine the appearance of the place when the nineteenth century was young. It contained good old three-story red-brick houses which, when Nephew went there, were not altogether given up to purposes of trade and the law. In a map dated 1740 "Tuke's Court" is shown extending northward from "Cursitor Alley" and then turning sharply to the east and bringing up in Castle Yard, which gets into Holborn, on the City side of Staples

Inn. "Tuke's Court" long ago became "Took's Court," and "Cursitor Alley" became Cursitor Street, known to enthusiasts the world over as a byway made famous by Charles Dickens. One of the old buildings in the court acquired fame as the "Sponging House" in which Richard Brinsley Sheridan was for a time immured for debt. Sloman's notorious sponging-house, or private prison, where, as Thackeray tells us, Captain Crawley languished, and where Disraeli's Captain Armine was a temporary guest, was close by in Cursitor Street.

At No. 21 Took's Court, before the Nephew came, one John M'Creery had a printing-office which he had leased of Richard Valpy, who had formerly been a printer there, and who had manufactured in the house the well-known hundred

volume edition of "Valpy's Classics." In one hundred years Number Twenty-One had a dozen tenants and almost as many owners. Charles Whittingham, the Nephew, took the place for twenty-one years from June, 1828. He started in a small way, the Uncle bearing with him the responsibilities of the lease for security's sake. I do not find that Nephew had any money from his relative, or that he even asked for it. The Caslons, who were then, as they are now, leading typefounders of London, supplied him with an outfit on long credit, and offered to advance him capital, as