s Mr. Noble says, with half-a-crown, died in March,
1739, worth L1,000. Thomas Read was a later tenant. Charles Lamb
mentions "saloop" in one of his essays, and says, "Palates otherwise not
uninstructed in dietetical elegancies sup it up with avidity."
Chimney-sweeps, beloved by Lamb, approved it, and eventually stalls were
set up in the streets, as at present to reach even humbler customers.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] An intelligent compositor (Mr. J.P.S. Bicknell), who has been a
noter of curious passages in his time, informs me that Bell was the
first printer who confined the small letter "s" to its present shape,
and rejected altogether the older form "s." [Transcriber's Note: "s."
refers to the long s of Early English]

[3] The real fact is, the famous snuff was merely called from the number
of the drawer that held it.

CHAPTER VI.

FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--SHOE LANE AND BELL YARD).

The Kit-Kat Club--The Toast for the Year--Little Lady Mary--Drunken
John Sly--Garth's Patients--Club removed to Barn Elms--Steele at the
"Trumpet"--Rogues' Lane--Murder--Beggars' Haunts--Thieves'
Dens--Coiners--Theodore Hook in Hemp's Sponging-house--Pope in Bell
Yard--Minor Celebrities--Apollo Court.

Opposite Child's Bank, and almost within sound of the jingle of its
gold, once stood Shire Lane, afterwards known as Lower Serle's Place. It
latterly became a dingy, disreputable defile, where lawyers' clerks and
the hangers-on of the law-courts were often allured and sometimes
robbed; yet it had been in its day a place of great repute. In this lane
the Kit-Kat, the great club of Queen Anne's reign, held its sittings, at
the "Cat and Fiddle," the shop of a pastrycook named Christopher Kat.
The house, according to local antiquaries, afterwards became the
"Trumpet," a tavern mentioned by Steele in the _Tatler_, and latterly
known as the "Duke of York." The Kit-Kats were originally Whig patriots,
who, at the end of King William's reign, met in this out-of-the-way
place to devise measures to secure the Protestant succession and keep
out the pestilent Stuarts. Latterly they assembled for simple enjoyment;
and there have been grave disputes as to whether the club took its name
from the punning sign, the "Cat and Kit," or from the favourite pies
which Christopher Kat had christened; and as this question will probably
last the antiquaries another two centuries, we leave it alone. According
to some verses by A