built. In former times "Peele's Coffee-House" was quite a house of
call and post-office for money-lenders and bill-discounters; though
crowds of barristers and solicitors also frequented it, in order to
consult the useful files of London and country newspapers hoarded there
for now more than a century. Mr. Jay has left us an amusing sketch of
one of the former frequenters of "Peele's"--the late Sir William Owen
Barlow, a bencher of the Middle Temple. This methodical old gentleman
had never travelled in a stage-coach or railway-carriage in his life,
and had not for years read a book. He came in for dinner at the same
hour every day, except in Term-time, and was very angry if any loud
talkers disturbed him at his evening paper. He once requested the
instant discharge of a waiter at "Peele's," because the civil but
ungrammatical man had said, "There are a leg of mutton, and there is
chops."

CHAPTER V.

FLEET STREET (_continued_).

The "Green Dragon"--Tompion and Pinchbeck--The _Record_--St. Bride's
and its Memories--_Punch_ and his Contributors--The _Dispatch_--The
_Daily Telegraph_--The "Globe Tavern" and Goldsmith--The _Morning
Advertiser_--The _Standard_--The _London Magazine_--A Strange
Story--Alderman Waithman--Brutus Billy--Hardham and his "37."

The original "Green Dragon" (No. 56, south) was destroyed by the Great
Fire, and the new building set six feet backward. During the Popish Plot
several anti-papal clubs met here; and from the windows Roger North
stood to see the shouting, torch-waving procession pass along, to burn
the Pope's effigy at Temple Bar. In the "Discussion Forum" many Lord
Chancellors of the future have tried their eloquence. It was celebrated
some years ago from an allusion to it made by Napoleon III.

At No. 67 (corner of Whitefriars Street) once lived that famous
watchmaker of Queen Anne's reign, Thomas Tompion, who is said, in 1700,
to have begun a clock for St. Paul's Cathedral which was to go one
hundred years without winding up. He died in 1713. His apprentice,
George Graham, invented, as Mr. Noble tells us, the horizontal
escapement, in 1724. He was succeeded by Mudge and Dutton, who, in 1768,
made Dr. Johnson his first watch. The old shop was (1850) one of the
last in Fleet Street to be modernised.

Between Bolt and Johnson's courts (152-166, north)--say near "Anderton's
Hotel"--there lived, in the reign of George II., at the sign of the
"Astronomer's Mu