Chapter II: Johnson and Goldsmith at the “cheese”

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so
much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.—JOHNSON.

Not the least delightful characteristic of the “Cheese” is the persistency of its old customers. Those who once have been admitted to its charmed circle soon become wedded to its ways. It is not merely to the goodly cheer provided there that this loyalty is due, although, no doubt, to the viands and the wines a share of it is to be attributed. An anecdote of the late Mr. George Augustus Sala, the well-known writer, _Daily Telegraph_ special correspondent, and genial _bon vivant_ and gastronomist, is delightfully illustrative of the attractions of the place from the side of the creature comforts. The story is told by the London correspondent of the _Liverpool Courier_ (December 10, 1895) in recording Mr. Sala’s death. He writes: “Some years ago Mr. Sala went to Paris on behalf of the _Daily Telegraph_, to write on the subject of French cooking and French restaurants. Such praise of Parisian kickshaws was never lavished before, and the extollation, to the complete discomfiture of English cooks, lasted for fully six weeks. Everything in the cooking line in Paris was grand, everything in England in the same line was horrible. At the end of the six weeks Mr. Sala returned to London, went immediately to the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street and said to the head waiter—‘William, bring me a beefsteak, some potatoes in their jackets, and a pint of ale. I’ve had nothing to eat for six weeks.’”

The sentimental attractions are equally strong, and their influence is felt even by the most occasional of guests whose situation in life, or whose distance from London, unfortunately precludes their being regular attendants at the hostelry. A fine acrostic sent to the landlord by the Rev. William Kerr-Smith, Vicar of Whiteby, Newcastle-on-Tyne, embodies some of the thoughts that naturally arise in the mind of the cultivated visitant:

C hanged are the times and changed, alas, the guests!
H ow changed from those who erst with gossip stored
E ach day saw grouped about thy cheerful board!
S till are their voices now, whose noisy jests
H ave filled these rooms with laughter. Gathered here
I n rare confusion Beau, and Wit and Sage,
R ich, Poor and Spendthrift, Youth and fuller age
E njoyed whilst yet they might thy festive cheer.

C areless of censure each one told his tale,
H eard the last scandal as he quaffed his ale.
E ager to praise, they scrupled not to school,
E njoyed the folly, but condemned the fool.
S o lived they far removed from dulness dire,
E schewed the commonplace and tuned the lyre.

Among the bygone guests with whose memory the Cheshire Cheese is fragrant, not the least notable was the immortal author of “The Deserted Village” and “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Indeed he was its very near neighbour, for Goldsmith’s lodging was at No. 6 Wine Office Court, nearly opposite the “Cheese,” and here he wrote “The Vicar of Wakefield.” It was on Johnson’s first visit to supper here with Goldsmith that Percy called for him on his way, and found him dressed in a new suit of clothes and well-powdered wig. Noticing Johnson’s unusual smartness, he heard from him the reason of it. “Sir, Goldsmith is a great sloven, and justifies his disregard of propriety by my practice. To-night I desire to show him a better example.” Johnson’s house, where the Dictionary was compiled, was within a minute’s walk, in Gough Square. Boswell does not record any visits to the “Cheese,” but Boswell’s acquaintance with Johnson began when Johnson was an old man, when he had given up the house in Gough Square, and Goldsmith had long departed from Wine Office Court. At the best, Boswell only knew Johnson’s life in widely separated sections. Boswell was in Edinburgh while Johnson was in Bolt Court, and it is certain Johnson wrote no diary for the benefit of his biographer. Witnesses who were on the spot supply the deficiency. Some of them Mr. Cyrus Jay, in a little book entitled, “The Law—What I have Seen, Heard and Known,” published in 1868, states that he had met. The book contains this inscription:

TO THE
LAWYERS AND GENTLEMEN
WITH WHOM I HAVE DINED FOR MORE THAN
HALF A CENTURY
AT
THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE TAVERN
WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET
THIS WORK
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY THEIR OBEDIENT SERVANT
CYRUS JAY

In his preface Mr. Jay says: “During the fifty-five years that I have frequented the Cheshire Cheese Tavern ... there have been only three landlords. When I first visited the house I used to meet several very old gentlemen, who remembered 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 removed to Gough Square and Bolt Court he was a constant visitor at the Cheshire Cheese, because nothing but a hurricane would have induced him to cross Fleet Street.”

Mr. Jay’s fifty-five years, from 1868, take us back to 1813, or little more than a quarter of a century after the death of Johnson. But who then was Mr. Jay, and what are his claims to credibility? “I have heard,” says Dr. Birkbeck Hill, that indefatigable inquirer into Johnsonian facts and dates, “a member of our (the Johnson) club relate that, when he was a student of law, there used to be pointed out to him in the Cheshire Cheese an old gentleman who, day after day, was always to be found there, prolonging his dinner by an unbroken succession of glasses of gin and water. It was as a kind of awful warning of the depths to which a lawyer might sink, that this toper was shown, and it was added in a whisper that he was the son of Jay, of Bath. Jay, of Bath, is well-nigh forgotten now, but during the first half of the present century his fame as a preacher stood exceedingly high. It was Cyrus Jay, his son, who for fifty-three years frequenting this ancient tavern, preserved and handed down this curious tradition of Johnson. The landlord has told me how, in his childhood, he used to hear in the distance the gruff voice of the old gentleman as he came along Fleet Street, and how sometimes he was sent to see Mr. Jay safe home to his chambers at 15 Serjeants’ Inn hard by. For most of his long life, port, that medium liquor, neither like claret for boys nor brandy for heroes, but the drink for men, had been his favourite beverage. A failing income brought him down at last to gin and water. He used to comfort himself by the reflection that he could get twice as drunk for half the money. He dined in the tavern to the very end. One evening he was led home to his lodgings, and within four-and-twenty hours he was dead. He was the last frequenter of the Old Cheshire Cheese who knew the men who had known Johnson. Mine host remembers a still older guest, Dr. Pooley by name, a barrister, who died about 1856, at the age of eighty. Night after night for many a long year he had dined at half-past seven to the minute on a ‘follower,’ the end chop of the loin. He, too, used to tell of the men of his younger days, who boasted that they had often spent an evening there with Dr. Samuel Johnson.”

Another writer, Mr. Cyrus Redding, who went to live in Gough Square in 1806, in his “Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal,” published in 1858, takes us a little further back. He says:

“I often dined at the Cheshire Cheese. Johnson and his friends, I was informed, used to do the same, and I was told I should see individuals who had met them there. This I found to be correct. The company was more select than in later times. Johnson had been dead about twenty years, but there were Fleet Street tradesmen who well remembered both Johnson and Goldsmith in this place of entertainment.”

Mr. Cyrus Jay, deploring the loss of the Mitre, the Cock, and other old taverns, remarks, “There still remains the Old Cheshire Cheese, in Wine Office Court, which will afford the present generation, it is hoped, for some years to come, an opportunity of witnessing the kind of tavern in which our forefathers delighted to assemble for refreshment.

“There was a Mr. Tyers, a silk merchant on Ludgate Hill, and Colonel Laurence, who carried the colours of the 20th regiment at the battle of Minden, ever fond of repeating that his regimental comrades bore the brunt on that memorable day. The evening was the time we thus met. There was also a sprinkling of lawyers, old demisoldes and men of science; among the latter was a Mr. Adams, an optician, of Fleet St.

“Colonel Laurence showed me Goldsmith’s tomb in the Temple Churchyard; he was never tired of talking of his acquaintance with the poet, whom he knew when Goldsmith, as well as Johnson, lived hard by the Cheshire Cheese. I listened with eagerness to what these men of other days told me. Tyers broke a leg, and was confined to his bed for a long time, and the rubicund-cheeked Colonel passed the way of all the earth in a year or two after I first became acquainted with him. He used to speak of Goldsmith’s ordinary person, and told me the poet never broke in upon the conversation when Johnson was talking.

“The left-hand room, entering the ‘Cheshire,’ and the table on the extreme right upon entering that room, was the table occupied by Johnson and his friends almost uniformly. This table and the room are now as they were when I first saw them, having had the curiosity to visit them recently. They were, and are still, as Johnson and his friends left them in their time. Goldsmith sat at Johnson’s left hand.” But the public room on the ground floor was not the only place affected by Johnson and his friends. When they wished to retire from the madding crowd a little room on another floor supplied all the privacy they occasionally desired, and here to this day is carefully preserved the chair from which the Doctor thundered.”