the town,
and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the theater in
Blackfriars, in which he owned a share. It is said that he dwelt at No.
134 Aldersgate Street (the house was long ago demolished), and in that
region, amid all the din of traffic and all the discordant adjuncts of a
new age, those who love him are in his company. Milton was born in a court
adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer comes upon him as a
resident in St. Bride's churchyard,--where the poet Lovelace was
buried,--and at No. 19 York Street, Westminster, in later times occupied
by Jeremy Bentham and by William Hazlitt. When secretary to Cromwell he
lived in Scotland Yard, now the headquarters of the London police. His
last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that
spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walking through King
Street, Westminster, you will not forget the great poet Edmund Spenser,
who, a victim to barbarity, died there, in destitution and grief. Ben
Jonson's terse record of that calamity says: "The Irish having robbed
Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and
his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street."
Ben Jonson is closely associated with places that can still be seen. He
passed his boyhood near Charing Cross--having been born in Hartshorn Lane,
now Northumberland Street; he attended the parish school of St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields; and persons who roam about Lincoln's Inn will call
to mind that he helped to build it--a trowel in one hand and a volume of
Horace in the other. His residence, in his day of fame, was outside the
Temple Bar, but all that neighborhood is new.

The Mermaid,--which Jonson frequented, in companionship with Shakespeare,
Fletcher, Herrick, Chapman, and Donne,--was in Bread Street, but no trace
of it remains, and a banking house stands now on the site of the old Devil
Tavern, in Fleet Street, a room in which, called "The Apollo," was the
trysting place of the club of which he was the founder. The famous
inscription, "O, rare Ben Jonson!" is three times cut in the Abbey; once
in Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle, where he was buried,--a
little slab in the pavement marking his grave. Dryden once dwelt in a
quaint, narrow house, in Fetter Lane,--the street in which Dean Swift has
placed the home of "Gulliver," and where the famous Doomsday Book was
kept,--but, later, he removed to a liner dw