period
certainly had contained private houses, in one of which Grinling Gibbons
had lived. The inn stood round an inner court, entered by a second
archway which stood about half-way up the present yard. Over the archway
facing the outer court was the sign of "The Bell," and all round the
interior ran those covered galleries, so prominent a feature in old
London inns.

Near the "Belle Sauvage" resided that proud cobbler mentioned by Steele,
who has recorded his eccentricities. This man had bought a wooden figure
of a beau of the period, who stood before him in a bending position, and
humbly presented him with his awl, wax, bristles, or whatever else his
tyrannical master chose to place in his hand.

To No. 45 (south side), Ludgate Hill, that strange, independent man,
Lamb's friend, William Hone, the Radical publisher, came from Ship
Court, Old Bailey, where he had published those blasphemous "Parodies,"
for which he was three times tried and acquitted, to the vexation of
Lord Ellenborough. Here, having sown his seditious wild oats and broken
free from the lawyers, Hone continued his occasional clever political
satires, sometimes suggested by bitter Hazlitt and illustrated by George
Cruikshank's inexhaustible fancy. Here Hone devised those delightful
miscellanies, the "Every-Day Book" and "Year Book," into which Lamb and
many young poets threw all their humour and power. The books were
commercially not very successful, but they have delighted generations,
and will delight generations to come. Mr. Timbs, who saw much of Hone,
describes him as sitting in a second-floor back room, surrounded by rare
books and black-letter volumes. His conversion from materialism to
Christianity was apparently sudden, though the process of change had no
doubt long been maturing. The story of his conversion is thus related by
Mr. Timbs:--"Hone was once called to a house, in a certain street in a
part of the world of London entirely unknown to him. As he walked he
reflected on the entirely unknown region. He arrived at the house, and
was shown into a room to wait. All at once, on looking round, to his
astonishment and almost horror, every object he saw seemed familiar to
him. He said to himself, 'What is this? I was never here before, and yet
I have seen all this before, and as a proof I have I now remember a very
peculiar knot behind the shutters.' He opened the shutters, and found
the very knot. 'Now, then,' he thought, 'here is something I