nd. In 1508 he became printer to
King Henry VII., and after this produced editions of Fabyan's and
Froissart's "Chronicles." He seems to have had a bitter feud with a
rival printer, named Robert Rudman, who pirated his trade-mark. In one
of his books he thus quaintly falls foul of the enemy: "But truly
Rudeman, because he is the rudest out of a thousand men.... Truly I
wonder now at last that he hath confessed it in his own typography,
unless it chanced that even as the devil made a cobbler a mariner, he
made him a printer. Formerly this scoundrel did prefer himself a
bookseller, as well skilled as if he had started forth from Utopia. He
knows well that he is free who pretendeth to books, although it be
nothing more."

To this brief chronicle of early Fleet Street printers let us add
Richard Bancks, who, in 1600, at his office, "the sign of the White
Hart," printed that exquisite fairy poem, Shakespeare's "Midsummer
Night's Dream." How one envies the "reader" of that office, the
compositors--nay, even the sable imp who pulled the proof, and snatched
a passage or two about Mustard and Pease Blossom in a surreptitious
glance! Another great Fleet Street printer was Richard Grafton, the
printer, as Mr. Noble says, of the first correct folio English
translation of the Bible, by permission of Henry VIII. When in Paris,
Grafton had to fly with his books from the Inquisition. After his patron
Cromwell's execution, in 1540, Grafton was sent to the Fleet for
printing Bibles, but in the happier times of Edward VI. he became king's
printer at the Grey Friars (now Christ's Hospital). His former
fellow-worker in Paris, Edward Whitchurch, set up his press at De
Worde's old house, the "Sun," near the Fleet Street conduit. He
published the "Paraphrase of Erasmus," a copy of which, Mr. Noble says,
existed, with its desk-chains, in the vestry of St. Benet's, Gracechurch
Street. Whitchurch married the widow of Archbishop Cranmer.

The "Hercules Pillars" (now No. 27, Fleet Street, south) was a
celebrated tavern as early as the reign of James I., and in the now
nameless alley by its side several houses of entertainment nestled
themselves. The tavern is interesting to us chiefly because it was a
favourite resort of Pepys, who frequently mentions it in his quaint and
graphic way.

No. 37 (Hoare's Bank), south, is well known by the golden bottle that
still hangs, exciting curiosity, over the fanlight of the entrance.
Popular legend has it t