of the first to assist the children of Burns. At one of his
mayoralty dinners, seven sons of George III. were guests.

Sir William Domville (Stationer), mayor in 1814, gave the great
Guildhall banquet to the Prince Regent and the Allied Sovereigns during
the short and fallacious peace before Waterloo. The dinner was served on
plate valued at L200,000, and the entire entertainment cost nearly
L25,000. The mayor was made baronet for this.

In 1815 reigned Alderman Birch, the celebrated Cornhill confectioner.
The business at No. 15, Cornhill was established by Mr. Horton, in the
reign of George I. Samuel Birch, born in 1787, was for many years a
member of the Common Council, a City orator, an Alderman of the Ward of
Candlewick, a poet, a dramatic writer, and Colonel of the City Militia.
His pastry was, after all, the best thing he did, though he laid the
first stone of the London Institution, and wrote the inscription to
Chantrey's statue of George III., now in the Council Chamber, Guildhall.
"Mr. Patty-pan" was Birch's nickname.

Theodore Hook, or some clever versifier of the day, wrote an amusing
skit on the vain, fussy, good-natured Jack-of-all-trades, beginning--

"Monsieur grown tired of fricassee,
Resolved Old England now to see,
The country where their roasted beef
And puddings large pass all belief."

Wherever this inquisitive foreigner goes he find Monsieur Birch--

"Guildhall at length in sight appears,
An orator is hailed with cheers.
'Zat orator, vat is hees name?'
'Birch the pastrycook--the very same.'"

He meets him again as militia colonel, poet, &c. &c., till he returns to
France believing Birch Emperor of London.

Birch possessed considerable literary taste, and wrote poems and musical
dramas, of which "The Adopted Child" remained a stock piece to our own
time. The alderman used annually to send, as a present, a Twelfth-cake
to the Mansion House. The upper portion of the house in Cornhill has
been rebuilt, but the ground-floor remains intact, a curious specimen of
the decorated shop-front of the last century; and here are preserved two
doorplates, inscribed "Birch, successor to Mr. Horton," which are 140
years old. Alderman Birch died in 1840, having been succeeded in the
business in Cornhill in 1836, by Ring and Brymer.

In 1816-17, we come to a mayor of great notoriety, Sir Matthew Wood, a
druggist in Falcon Square. He was a Devonshire man, who began life as a