I

CHAPTER III

T was a little after the middle of the last century that our story opens again.

George II., whose virtues and vices were clock-like in their regularities, was on the throne; Queen Caroline, whom he had always abused and always venerated, was in her grave for twelve or more years past. Outside politics were ripening for that French and English war-in which a Montcalm and a Wolfe figured upon our side the water, and which has been put in picturesque array by Francis Parkman; the geraniums and oleanders were blossoming over the Portuguese grave of Harry Fielding; Thomson had sung his last notes in his Castle of Indolence and was laid to restnot in Kelso, or Dryburgh, where his body should have mouldered-but in a little Richmond Church, within gunshot of the "Star and Garter." Gray was still studying the scholarly measures of the Bard, in his beloved Cambridge; Horace Walpole playing the élégant was fattening on his revenues at

Strawberry Hill; while Dr. Johnson-notwithstanding the Dictionary and the Rambler --had been latterly (1756) in such sore straits as to appeal to his friend Richardson for the loan of a few guineas to save him from jail; and Richardson, fresh then in his triumphs from Clarissa Harlowe and the great Grandison, was not slow to grant the request,1 and to enjoy all the more his Kingship among the women, in his great house out at Hammersmith.

A sharp walk of a quarter of an hour from St. Paul's would, in that time, take one into the green fields that lay in Islington; and beyond, upon the Waltham road, were the hedges, pikes, and quiet paddocks, through which went galloping-at a little later daythat citizen of "credit and renown," John Gilpin, instead of the clattering suburbs that now stretch nearly all the way between Cheapside and the "Bell" at Edmonton.

Of the many bridges which now span the Thames, only two2 representatives were in existence; the old Westminster was there in its first freshness, and ferrymen quarrelling

1

See note, Hill's Boswell, p. 304, vol. i.

2 Blackfriars was not built until 1769, and the old Westminster in 1750.

with it, because it spoiled their carrying trade to Vauxhall and parts adjacent; and the old London Bridge was cumbered by lumbering houses, held up by trusses and cross-beams, while its openings were so low and its piers so many as to make, at certain stages of the tide, furious cascades which drove great wheels geared to cumbrous pumping machinery, to throw up water for the behoof of London citizens. The old Fleet Prison was in existence, and its smudgy stifling air hung over all that low region above which now leap the great arches of the Holborn Viaduct; and round the corner, in the reek and smoke of Fleet Street, half way between the spire of St. Bride's and the spire of St. Clement's Danes-up a grimy court that is, very likely, just as grimy to-day, lived that Leviathan of a man, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

JOHNSON AND RASSELAS

He had passed through his green days, and the nights when he strolled supperless about London with that poor wretch of a poet Richard Savage. The school at Edial with its three pupils was well behind him; so was the dining behind the screen at Cave's (the bookseller who