eries of readings, in an illness which hastened his death.

THE HIGHWAY OF LETTERS

In Dickens' time, as in our own, and even at as early a period as that of
Drayton, Fleet Street, as it has latterly been known, has been the abode
of letters and of literary labours.

The diarists, journalists, political and religious writers of every party
and creed have adopted it as their own particular province. Grub Street no
longer exists, so that the simile of Doctor Johnson does not still hold
true.

The former Grub Street--"inhabited by writers of small histories,
dictionaries, and temporary poems" (_vide_ Doctor Johnson's
Dictionary)--has become Milton Street through the mindful regard of some
former sponsor, by reason of the nearness of its location to the former
Bunhill residence of the great epic poet. But modern Fleet Street exists
to-day as the street of journalists and journalism, from the humble
penny-a-liner and his product to the more sedate and verbose political
paragrapher whose reputation extends throughout the world.

Nowhere else is there a long mile of such an atmosphere, redolent of
printers' ink and the bustle attendant upon the production and
distribution of the printed word. And nowhere else is the power of the
press more potent.

Its historian has described it as "a line of street, with shops and houses
on either side, between Temple Bar and Ludgate Hill, one of the largest
thoroughfares in London, and one of the most famous."

Its name was derived from the ancient streamlet called the Fleet, more
commonly "Fleet Ditch," near whose confluence with the Thames, at Ludgate
Hill, was the notorious Fleet Prison, with its equally notorious
"marriages."

This reeking abode of mismanagement was pulled down in 1844, when the
"Marshalsea," "The Fleet," and the "Queen's Bench" (all three reminiscent
of Dickens, likewise Newgate, not far away) were consolidated in a new
structure erected elsewhere.

The unsavoury reputation of the old prison of the Fleet, its "chaplains,"
and its "marriages," are too well-known to readers of contemporary
literature to be more than mentioned here.

The memory of the famous persons who were at one time or another confined
in this "noisome place with a pestilential atmosphere" are recalled by
such names as Bishop Hooper, the martyr; Nash, the poet and satirist;
Doctor Donne, Killigrew, the Countess of Dorset, Viscount Falkland,
William Prynne, Richard Savage, and--of th