Boar's Head, SOUTHWARK, one of the famous borough taverns, stood on the east side of the High Street, but the site is now covered by the approaches to London Bridge. The inn belonged to Sir John Falstolf, who lived in Southwark. Among the Paston Letters is one dated August 1479 from Henry Wyndesore, one of Falstolf's household, to John Paston, asking him to remind Sir John of his promise respecting the setting up of Wyndesore at the Boar's Head. The house became the property of Magdalen College, Oxford, "the gift of William Waynflete, late Bishop of Winchester, to the president and scholars, which he and others had of the gift of John Fastolfe, Knight, which he obtained for long services and course of justice."—Ashburnham MS., British Museum. The inn was at one time leased to the father of John Timbs the antiquary, who let it out in tenements.

Boar's Head Tavern, EASTCHEAP, a celebrated tavern, commemorated by Shakespeare, destroyed in the Great Fire, rebuilt immediately after, and finally demolished (to allow of the new London Bridge approaches) in 1831. It stood in Great Eastcheap, between Small Alley and St. Michael's Lane, four taverns filling up the intervening space The Chicken, near St. Michael's Alley; The Boar's Head; The Plough; and The Three Kings. The back part of the house looked upon the burying-ground of St. Michael's, Crooked Lane. The statue of William IV. nearly marks the site. Stow tells us, in a sidenote to his Survey (p. 82), that in the time of Henry IV. "there was no tavern then in Eastcheap." Shakespeare alone refers to this tavern.1 It first appears as a tavern in a lease dated 1537, of "all that tavern called the Bore's Hedde, cum cellariis sollariis et aliis suis pertinentiis in Estchepe," etc. It was kept by Thomas Wright in 1588.-Index to Remembrancia, p. 355 (note). It was probably the best tavern in the street; it must have been of considerable size, as plays were acted in it. John Rhodoway, "Vintner at the Bore's Head," was buried, in 1623, in the adjoining church of St. Michael.2 The tavern was rebuilt of brick after the Great Fire, with its door in the centre, a window above, and then a boar's head cut in the stone, with the initials of the landlord (I. T.), and the date (near the snout) of 1668. This stone is now in the City Museum, Guildhall. Hutton, writing in 1785, says that "on each side of the doorway is a vine branch, carved in wood, rising more than three feet from the ground, loaded with leaves and clusters; and on the top of each a little Falstaff, eight inches high, in the dress of his day." The Boar's Head was subsequently

1 The Boar's Head is not named by Shakespeare in the text of either the first or second part of Henry IV. The scene headings (Henry IV. part i. Act ii. Sc. 4, and elsewhere)-"Eastcheap. A Room in the Boar's Head Tavern," does not occur in the early editions; but a passage in the second part of Henry IV., Act. ii. Sc. 2, where Prince Henry inquires after Falstaff, supports the tradition :

P. Hen. Where sups he? doth the old boar feed in the old frank?

Bard. At the old place, my lord; in Eastcheap. 2 In his will (in Doctors' Commons), he calls himself "Citizen and Vintner," but does not mention "The Boar's Head."

3 Hutton's Journey from Birmingham to London, 1785.

Idivided into two and ceased to be a tavern. At the time of its demolition the house was occupied by a gunsmith.

There was with me at that time [June 1588] out of the school [Merchant Taylors'], George Wrighte, son of Thomas Wrighte, of London, Vintner, that dwelt at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, who sithence having good inheritance, descended to him, is now clerk of the King's Stable, and a knight, and a very discreet and honest gentleman.-Liber Familiaris of Sir James Whitelocke (Cam. Soc.), p. 12.

March 31, 1602.-Letter from the Lords of the Council to the Lord Mayor, granting permission to the Servants of the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of Worcester to play at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap.-Remembrancia, p. 54.

I mentioned a club in London at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, the very tavern where Falstaff and his joyous companions met; the members of which all assume Shakespeare's characters. One is Falstaff, another Prince Henry, another Bardolph, and so on. Johnson :-"Don't be of it, Sir. Now that you have a name you must be careful to avoid many things not bad in themselves, but which will lessen your character."-Boswell, by Croker, p. 348.

Among the many convivial parties which have assembled in this old tavern, one deserves particular mention :—

He [William Pitt] was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control. Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of images seemed always present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the readiest and most apt in the general allusions.-Wilberforce [1780], Life, vol. i. p. 18.

Goldsmith wrote A Reverie in this tavern (Essay No. 4); and Washington Irving an entertaining paper in The Sketch Book. The former, forgetting the Fire, fancied himself (Boswell, we have seen, did the same) in the very tavern that Falstaff frequented; and the latter, in his enthusiasm, has converted a sacramental cup, preserved at that time in the vestry of St. Michael's, into Dame Quickly's parcel-gilt goblet.

Bolt Court, on the north side of FLEET STREET, over against The Bolt-in-Tun, from which circumstance it perhaps derives its name.

Bolt Court, very good and open, with a freestone pavement; hath good houses, well-inhabited.-Strype, B. iii. p. 277, ed. 1720.

Eminent Inhabitants.-Dr. Johnson, in No. 8, on the right-hand side as you ascend from Fleet Street, from 1776 till his death in 1784. He died in the back room of the first floor. Johnson's house, for which he paid £40 a year to Allen, the printer, was afterwards inhabited by Mr. Bensley, Allen's successor in his printing business in Bolt Court. A fire (November 1807) nearly destroyed Johnson's rooms. A second fire (June 26, 1819) destroyed them entirely. Mr. Bensley rebuilt the house as a printing office, but it was sold in 1858, with three adjoining houses, to the Stationers' Company, whose excellent Middle-Class School (opened 1861) now occupies the site. Long before Dr. Johnson went to live in Bolt Court his blind friend Miss Williams had lodgings there, and Boswell describes him in 1763

as drinking tea with her every night before he went home to the Temple, however late it was, and that she always sat up for him.1 Miss Williams became an inmate of his house in Bolt Court, along with his other pensioners, who however could not agree among themselves, and hardly with their forbearing benefactor. "We have tolerable concord at home," he writes to Mrs. Thrale, November 14, 1778, "but no love. Williams hates everybody. Lovet hates Desmoulines, and does not love Williams. Desmoulines hates them both. Poll loves none of them." And a year later (October 16, 1779) he writes, "Discord and discontent reign in my humble habitation as in the palaces of monarchs." 2

Behind it was a garden, 3 which he took delight in watering; a room on the ground floor was assigned to Mrs. Williams, and the whole of the two pair of stairs floor was made a repository for his books, one of the rooms thereon being his study. -Sir John Hawkins, p. 530.

He [Johnson] particularly piqued himself upon his nice observance of ceremonious punctilios towards ladies. A remarkable instance of this was his never suffering any lady to walk from his house to her carriage through Bolt Court, unattended by himself to hand her into it; and if any obstacle prevented it from driving off, there he would stand by the door of it, and gather a mob around him; indeed they would begin to gather the moment he appeared handing the lady down the steps into Fleet Street. Sometimes he exhibited himself at the distance of eight or ten doors from Bolt Court to get at the carriage, to the no small diversion of the populace.—Miss Reynolds.

"ceremonious punctilios "

But there was refined courtesy as well as in his behaviour to his fair visitors. When Mrs. Siddons called upon him in Bolt Court and Frank Barber could not immediately provide her with a chair, he said, "You see, Madam, wherever you go there are no seats to be got." Among his visitors at Bolt Court was John Howard, who (April 1784) brought him the enlarged edition of his work on Prisons.

James Ferguson, the astronomer, at No. 4, where he died in November, 1776. William Cobbett, at No. 11: here he published his Register.

Bolt-in-Tun, FLEET STREET, a noted inn and coach office, No. 64, on the south side. The inn is gone; the coach office has become a railway office, and only the name is left of Bolt-in-Tun Yard. The Bolt-in-Tun was the rebus of the Bolton family. The White Friars had a grant of the "Hospitium vocatum Le Bolt en ton" in 1443.4

Bolton Street, PICCADILLY, the second turning west of Devonshire House; at the top is Bolton Row. It was built circ. 1699,5 and described in 1708 as "the most westerly Street in London, between

1 Croker's Boswell, p. 143.

2 There is a view of the house and of Johnson's sitting-room in vol. vii. of Croker's Boswell, ed. of 1835. An engraving in vol. lvii. of the European Magazine (1810) shows the house as it was before injury by fire or alteration.

3 There are several references to the garden in

Boswell, and in Johnson's letters. On one occasion he writes to Mrs. Thrale (August 14, 1784), "I have three bunches of grapes on the vine in my garden."

4 Rot. Pat. 21 Hen. VI.; and Coll. Top. et Gen. v. 383.

5 Rate-books of St. Martin's.

the road to Knightsbridge, south, and the Fields, north."1 Eminent Inhabitant. The celebrated Earl of Peterborough, from 1710 to 1724.2

I lie at my Lord Peterborough's, in Bolton Street, where any commands of your's will reach me.-Pope, Works, ed. Roscoe, vol. vii. p. 126.

The extraordinary Choice Collection [of Mr. Streeton late Serjeant Painter] consisting of models, figures, etc. . . . will be sold by Auction on the 5th Inst. at 3 in the afternoon, at his late dwelling-house Next Bolton Street in Hide Park Road.-Advertisement in Spectator of October 2, 1711 (No. 185).

About 1715 Pope writes to Martha and Theresa Blount as the "Young Ladies in Bolton Street." George Grenville the minister (d. 1770) lived here for several years before his death. Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, died here in 1778. Madame D'Arblay removed here, October 8, 1818, shortly after her husband's death. Rogers took Sir Walter Scott to visit her here, and the latter found she had not lost the power of saying pleasant things. "She told me she had wished to see two persons-myself, of course, being one, the other George Canning. This was really a compliment to be pleased with." 3 Lord Melbourne lived here, and here gave his noted "little dinners." The young Pretender in his asserted visit to London in 1760 is said to have lodged in Bolton Street. Watier's Club was held in Bolton Street. Watier was cook to the Prince of Wales, under whose auspices the club was started. The dinners were unequalled in London. Mrs. Delaney was living in Bolton Row in 1753; and Mrs. Vesey gave her fashionable and literary evening parties (conversations) at her house in Bolton Row till her removal to Clarges Street in 1780.

Bond Street (OLD), PICCADILLY, built 1686,4 and so called after Sir Thomas Bond, of Peckham, in the county of Surrey, Bart, Comptroller of the Household to the Queen-Mother (Henrietta Maria). The Street occupies part of the site of Clarendon House. The east side was the last built, previously to which the west side was known as Albemarle Buildings. Hatton (1708) calls it "a fine new street mostly inhabited by the nobility and gentry."

Clarendon House, built by Mr. Pratt; since quite demolished by Sir Thomas Bond, etc., who purchased it to builde a streete of tenements to his undoing.Evelyn, Note to his copy of a letter to Lord Cornbury. [See Clarendon House.]

Eminent Inhabitants.-The first Duke of St. Albans (d. 1726), the son of Nell Gwynne and Charles II.

To be let or sold . . . A House in Old Bond Street, Piccadilly, of four Rooms on a Floor with Closets, good Cellar, and all other conveniences. Being the House in which the late Duke of St. Alban's lived. Inquire at the said House.—London Gazette, June 27; July 1, 1727.

Lavinia Fenton, original Polly in the Beggar's Opera. She came here in September 1730, taking the house "in which the Lady

1 Hatton, 8vo, 1708, p. 815.

2 Rate-books of St. Martin's.

3 Diary in Lockhart's Life of Scott, chap. 72.

4 Rate-books of St. Martin's.

Elizabeth Wentworth lived." 1 The Countess of Macclesfield, the supposed mother of Richard Savage. She died here, October 11, 1753, surviving Savage and the publication of Johnson's life of him. Edmund Gibbon, 1758. "In Bond Street with my books." Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, died March 18, 1768, "at the silk-bag shop" (No. 41, now a tailor's), on the west side.

About this time Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk bag shop in Old Bond Street. I went to Mr. Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said "Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.-Travels of John Macdonald (a footman).

Richard West writes to Gray from Bond Street, 1740. Archibald Bower, the ex-Jesuit, author of Lives of the Popes, died here, September 3, 1766. James Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, gave (October 16, 1769) a dinner to Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith, and Garrick, at his lodgings in this street, Goldsmith appearing in the "bloom-coloured coat" made for him by John Filby, at the Harrow in Water Lane.2 James Northcote, R.A., at No. 2 in 1781. Sir Thomas Lawrence, at No. 24, before his election into the Royal Academy, 1791, and at No. 29, when elected; he finally left the street on August 24, 1794. Ozias Humphrey, the miniature painter (d. 1810), at No. 13 in 1796. In the first edition of Amelia, published 1752, Fielding describes Booth as walking by the side of the wounded Colonel Bath from Grosvenor Gate to Bond Street, "where then lived the most eminent surgeon in the kingdom, perhaps in the world." In subsequent editions this was modified to "where then lived a very eminent surgeon."

Bond Street (NEW), the extension northward of Old Bond Street to Oxford Street, built circ. 1721, in which year it is rated for the first time in the books of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields.

What's not destroyed by Time's devouring hand?

Where's Troy, and where's the Maypole in the Strand?

Pease, cabbages and turnips once grew where

Now stands New Bond Street, and a newer Square;

Such piles of building now rise up and down,

London itself seems going out of town.

Bramston's Art of Politicks, Dodsley's Coll., 1751, vol. i. p. 266. Eminent Inhabitants.-Swift spent his last three weeks in London at his cousin Lancelot's house "in New Bond Street, over against the Crown and Cushion." Here he came (August 31, 1727), after hurriedly quitting Pope's house at Twickenham, to brood over the news of Stella's sufferings.3 Johnson wrote from Lichfield, October 10, 1767, to "Benet Langton, Esq. at Mr. Bothwell's Perfumer, in New Bond Street." » 4 Mrs. and Miss Gunning at No. 147 in 1792.

1 Grubb Street Journal, for September 1, 1730. 2 Frith's picture of this scene was sold for

£4567: 10s. at Christie's on April 24, 1875.

3 Scott's Swift, vol. xvii. p. 143.

4 Croker's Boswell, p. 188.