y is afforded in a plate of the world-renowned
'Cheddar' pudding. It is of this latter luxury that we are now assembled
to partake, and that with all fitting ceremony and observance. As we
sit, like pensioners in hall, the silence is broken only by a strange
sound, as of a hardly human voice, muttering cabalistic words, 'Ullo mul
lum de loodle wumble jum!' it cries, and we know that chops and potatoes
are being ordered for some benighted outsider, ignorant of the fact that
it is pudding-day."

CHAPTER XI.

FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES--SHOE LANE.

The First Lucifers--Perkins' Steam Gun--A Link between Shakespeare
and Shoe Lane--Florio and his Labours--"Cogers' Hall"--Famous
"Cogers"--A Saturday Night's Debate--Gunpowder Alley--Richard
Lovelace, the Cavalier Poet--"To Althea, from Prison"--Lilly the
Astrologer, and his Knaveries--A Search for Treasure with Davy
Ramsay--Hogarth in Harp Alley--The "Society of Sign
Painters"--Hudson, the Song Writer--"Jack Robinson"--The Bishop's
Residence--Bangor House--A Strange Story of Unstamped
Newspapers--Chatterton's Death--Curious Legend of his Burial--A
well-timed Joke.

At the east corner of Peterborough Court (says Mr. Timbs) was one of the
earliest shops for the instantaneous light apparatus, "Hertner's
Eupyrion" (phosphorus and oxymuriate matches, to be dipped in sulphuric
acid and asbestos), the costly predecessor of the lucifer match. Nearly
opposite were the works of Jacob Perkins, the engineer of the steam gun
exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery, Strand, and which the Duke of
Wellington truly foretold would never be advantageously employed in
battle.

One golden thread of association links Shakespeare to Shoe Lane. Slight
and frail is the thread, yet it has a double strand. In this narrow
side-aisle of Fleet Street, in 1624, lived John Florio, the compiler of
our first Italian dictionary. Now it is more than probable that our
great poet knew this industrious Italian, as we shall presently show.
Florio was a Waldensian teacher, no doubt driven to England by religious
persecution. He taught French and Italian with success at Oxford, and
finally was appointed tutor to that generous-minded, hopeful, and
unfortunate Prince Henry, son of James I. Florio's "Worlde of Wordes" (a
most copious and exact dictionary in Italian and English) was printed in
1598, and published by Arnold Hatfield for Edward Church, and "sold at
his shop over