elling, in Gerrard Street,
Soho, which was the scene of his death. (The house in Fetter Lane was torn
down in 1891.) Edmund Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a
beer-shop, but the memory of the great orator hallows the abode, and an
inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's
house, in Gough Square, bears (or bore) a mural tablet, and standing at
its time-worn threshold, the visitor needed no effort of fancy to picture
that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that afford access
to this queer, somber, melancholy retreat. In that house he wrote the
first dictionary of the English language and the characteristic, memorable
letter to Lord Chesterfield. The historical antiquarian society that has
marked many of the literary shrines of London has rendered a signal
service. The custom of marking the houses that are associated with
renowned names is, obviously, a good one, because it provides instruction,
and also because it tends to vitalize, in the general mind, a sense of the
value of honorable repute: it ought, therefore, to be everywhere adopted
and followed. A house associated with Sir Joshua Reynolds and a house
associated with Hogaith, both in Leicester Square, and houses associated
with Benjamin Franklin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street; Sheridan, in
Savile Row; Campbell, in Duke Street; Carrick, in the Adelphi Terrace;
Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, and Michael Faraday, in Blandford Street,
are only a few of the notable places which have been thus designated. More
of such commemorative work remains to be done, and, doubtless, will be
accomplished. The traveler would like to know in which of the houses in
Buckingham Street Coleridge lodged, while he was translating
"Wallenstein"; which house in Bloomsbury Square was the residence of
Akenside, when he wrote "The Pleasures of Imagination," and of Croly, when
he wrote "Salathiel"; or where it was that Gray lived, when he established
his residence in Russel Square, in order to be one of the first (as he
continued to be one of the most constant) students at the then newly
opened British Museum (1759).... These records, and such as these, may
seem trivialities, but Nature has denied an unfailing source of innocent
pleasure to the person who can feel no interest in them. For my part, when
rambling in Fleet Street it is a special delight to remember even so
little an incident as that recorded of the author of the "Elegy"--tha