Hawkins's Life of Johnson.
��In contradiction to those, who, having a wife and children, prefer domestic enjoyments to those which a tavern affords, I have heard him assert, that a tavern-chair was the throne of human felicity r . ' As soon,' said he, ' as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience an oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude 2 : when I am seated, I find the master courteous, and
��' We who write, if we want the talent, yet have the excuse that we do it for a poor subsistence ; but what can be urged in their defence, who not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of meer wantonness take pains to make themselves ridiculous.' Dry den's Preface to All for Love.
Johnson says of Addison : ' I have heard that his avidity did not satisfy itself with the air of renown, but that with great eagerness he laid hold on his proportion of the profits.' Works ; vii. 437. See also ante, ii. 14, and post, p. 107.
1 Ante, ii. 70.
2 ' It is worthy of remark by those who are curious in observing customs and modes of living, how little these houses of entertainment are now frequented, and what a diminution in their number has been experienced in London and Westminster in a period of about forty years backward. . . . When the frenzy of the times was abated [after the Restoration], taverns, especially those about the Exchange, became places for the transaction of almost all manner of business : there accounts were settled, conveyances executed, and there attornies sat, as at inns in the country on market days, to receive their clients. In that space near the Royal Exchange which is encompassed by Lombard, Grace- church, part of Bishop's-gate and Threadneedle streets, the number of taverns was not so few as twenty, and on the site of the Bank there stood four. At the Crown, which
��was one of them, it was not unusual in a morning to draw a butt of mountain, a hundred and twenty gallons, in gills.' Note by Hawkins.
In the Old Cheshire Cheese, that ancient Fleet Street tavern which looks now as it may have looked in Johnson's day, his seat is marked by an inscription. In no contemporary writer is mention made of his fre quenting the tavern. Cyrus Jay, in 1868, dedicated his book The Law : ( To the Lawyers and Gentlemen with whom I have dined for more than half a century at the Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.' In the Preface he says : ' During the fifty-three years I have frequented the Cheshire Cheese there have been only three landlords. When I first visited it I used to meet several old gentlemen who remem bered Dr. Johnson nightly at the Cheshire Cheese ; and they have told me, what is not generally known, that the Doctor, whilst living in the Temple, always went to the Mitre or the Essex Head ; but when he re moved to Gough Square or Bolt Court he was a constant visitor at the Cheshire Cheese, because nothing but a hurricane would have induced him to cross Fleet Street.'
There is much loose talk in this. It is not likely that many, if indeed any, of the old gentlemen remembered Johnson in Gough Square, for he left it in 1759. It was moreover a year later that he removed to the Temple. Boswell too records many
the
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