Page images
PDF
EPUB

And it was all he could afford had his friends but known it in those early days when "all that he wrote was not taken, and all that was taken was not approved”. when even "The Great Hoggarty Diamond" was so little thought of at Fraser's, that he had been called upon to shorten it. "An incident," says Trollope, "disagreeable in its nature to any literary gentleman, and likely to be specially so when he knows that his provision of bread, certainly of improved bread and butter, is at stake."

It was his table at The Cock that I had come to see on this Saturday afternoon - the only afternoon in the week when the room would be free of guests, every shop being cleared of customers at midday in modern London Town.

Henry, the old head waiter who had been moved across in 1887 with the fireplace and fittings, shook his head in answer to my inquiry as to the traditions connecting the great author with any special tables in the place. And so did the flat-nosed boy who sowed the seed of a fresh crop of sawdust from a tin pan, and who later on brought up an assortment of bread and cheese cut into little dominoes, which he scattered over the sawdust "to pizen de rats over Sunday," he explained. And so did the

proprietor, who produced a big book filled with the signatures of many celebrities the world over, who had eaten "a double" and had their pewters refilled. But careful scrutinizing failed to find any record of Mr. Thackeray's name among the T's. Neither had he any record of Pendennis or Warrington, who had their quarters in Lamb Court in the Middle Temple but five minutes away..

a ne

But I had already made up my mind. Thackeray's table would be hidden away in some corner, out of reach of the man who came in late, joggling the table as he squeezed past. It would be near a window, where the light would come in over his left shoulder cessity with most authors. It would, too, be near, and yet far enough away from the fire so that its blaze would cheer and yet not scorch; and so, after scanning the long narrow room, I placed him at the table on the left of my sketch - the one on this side of the grate. Here, he would have no opposite neighbour, there being only room for one, and here, too, his repast eaten and the room empty, he might, as was his custom, pull a wad of crumpled sheets from his coat-tail pocket just as he had done that day at Evans's, when he exclaimed to Mr. Lowell, "I have killed the Colonel! the tears

which had been swelling his lids for some time trickling down his face, the last word almost an inarticulate sob."

My sketch finished, Henry broiled me a chop and brought me a mug, and I squeezed into Mr. Thackeray's seat and opened my napkin, just as he had done scores of times. The chop was excellent, and so were the contents of the mug; so were the encomiums passed upon my sketch by the proprietor, Henry, and the flat-nosed boy the latter suggesting that it was "drawed to de loife."

[ocr errors]

N.B. Future historians, in writing of this important event, will please not get the dates mixed or twisted, as so often happens. It was at Mr. Thackeray's table in the new Cock, remember, that all this happened, and not with Mr. Thackeray in the old.

OF

CHAPTER XIII

THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

course he came here, tucked his knees

Funder the sharp edges of the heavy oak

tables, and ordered the dishes and brew he especially liked. This, and other like resorts, was his Bohemia, and Bohemia he loved.

66

"A pleasant land," he says in "Philip." not fenced with drab stucco like Tyburnia or Belgravia; not guarded by a huge standing army of footmen; not echoing with noble chariots; not replete with polite chintz drawing-rooms and neat tea-tables; a land over which hangs an endless fog, occasioned by much tobacco; a land of chambers, billiard-rooms, supper-rooms, oysters; a land of song; a land where sodawater flows freely in the morning; a land of tin dish-covers from taverns, and frothing porter; a land of lotus-eating (with lots of cayenne pepper), of pulls on the river, of delicious reading of novels, magazines, and saunterings in many studios; a land where men call each other by their Christian names; where most are old,

where almost all are young, and where, if a few oldsters enter, it is because they have preserved more tenderly and carefully than others their youthful spirits, and the delightful capacity to be idle."

And the Cheshire Cheese, then as now, is pure Bohemia.

If the dishes did not tempt him- particularly a famous pudding of lark and oysters, steak and kidney its associations certainly would, for it was near here, so tradition goes, that Goldsmith for the first time received Johnson at supper, and it was from here later on, Goldsmith being pressed for his rent, that Dr. Johnson set poor Goldsmith free.

The record in detail is worth repeating, as it gives a side light on the lives of some great men.

In 1760 Goldsmith removed to No. 6 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, where he occupied more respectable lodgings than any to which he had before aspired. It is nearly opposite the well-known Cheshire Cheese Tavern. Here, Dr. Johnson first visited him on the 31st of May, 1761. He came his clothes new and his wig nicely powdered, wishing, as he explained to Percy (of the "Reliques"), who inquired the cause of such unusual neatness, to show a better example to Goldsmith, whom he had heard of as

« PreviousContinue »