lt bird that struts with such
self-serene importance over the portal was the work of that great
carver, Grinling Gibbons.

"Dick's Coffee House" (No. 8, south) was kept in George II.'s time by a
Mrs. Yarrow and her daughter, who were much admired by the young
Templars who patronised the place. The Rev. James Miller, reviving an
old French comedietta by Rousseau, called "The Coffee House," and
introducing malicious allusions to the landlady and her fair daughter,
so exasperated the young barristers that frequented "Dick's," that they
went in a body and hissed the piece from the boards. The author then
wrote an apology, and published the play; but unluckily the artist who
illustrated it took the bar at "Dick's" as the background of his sketch.
The Templars went madder than ever at this, and the Rev. Miller, who
translated Voltaire's "Mahomet" for Garrick, never came up to the
surface again. It was at "Dick's" that Cowper the poet showed the first
symptoms of derangement. When his mind was off its balance he read a
letter in a newspaper at "Dick's," which he believed had been written to
drive him to suicide. He went away and tried to hang himself; the garter
breaking, he then resolved to drown himself; but, being hindered by some
occurrence, repented for the moment. He was soon after sent to a
madhouse in Huntingdon.

In 1681 a quarrel arose between two hot-headed gallants in "Dick's"
about the size of two dishes they had both seen at the "St. John's Head"
in Chancery Lane. The matter eventually was roughly ended at the "Three
Cranes" in the Vintry--a tavern mentioned by Ben Jonson--by one of them,
Rowland St. John, running his companion, John Stiles, of Lincoln's Inn,
through the body. The St. Dunstan's Club, founded in 1796, holds its
dinner at "Dick's."

The "Rainbow Tavern" (No. 15, south) was the second coffee-house started
in London. Four years before the Restoration, Mr. Farr, a barber, began
the trade here, trusting probably to the young Temple barristers for
support. The vintners grew jealous, and the neighbours, disliking the
smell of the roasting coffee, indicted Farr as a nuisance. But he
persevered, and the Arabian drink became popular. A satirist had soon to
write regretfully,--

"And now, alas! the drink has credit got,
And he's no gentleman that drinks it not."

About 1780, according to Mr. Timbs, the "Rainbow" was kept by Alexander
Moncrieff, grandfather of the dramatist who wrote _Tom and Je