Fleet Street Tributaries.J

RIVAL POETS.

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A MEETING OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN CRANE COURT (see p. 106).

petulant temper, he turned on his heel and told Dryden "that he was welcome to keep his wit and his breakfast to himself." Dryden's house was pulled down to make way for street improvements in 1887. A curious old book, a vade mecum for malt worms, temp. George I., thus immortalises the patriotism of a tavern-keeper in Fetter Lane :—

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'Though there are some who, with invidious look,
Have styl'd this bird more like a Russian duck
Than what he stands depicted for on sign,
He proves he well has croaked for prey within,
From massy tankards, formed of silver plate,
That walk throughout this noted house in state,
Ever since Englesfield, in Anna's reign,

To compliment each fortunate campaign,

Made one be hammered out for ev'ry town was ta'en."

IX.

IN the old times, when newspapers could not legally be published without a stamp, "various ingenious devices," says a writer in the Bookseller (1867), "were employed to deceive and mislead the officers employed by the Government. Many of the unstamped papers were printed in Crane Court, Fleet Street; and there, on their several days of publication, the officers of the Somerset House solicitor would watch, ready to seize them immediately they came from the press. But the printers were quite equal to the emergency. They would make up sham parcels of waste-paper, and send them out with an ostentatious show of secrecy. The officers -simple fellows enough, though they were called 'Government spies,' 'Somerset House myrmidons,' and other opprobrious names, in the unstamped papers-duly took possession of the parcels, after a decent show of resistance by their bearers, while the real newspapers intended for sale to the public were sent flying by thousands down a shoot in Fleur-de-Lys Court, and thence distributed in the course of the next hour or two all over the town."

The Royal Society came to Crane Court from Gresham College in 1710, and removed in 1782 to Somerset House, and afterwards to Burlington House, Piccadilly. This society originated in London in 1645, when Dr. Wilkins and certain philosophical friends met weekly to discuss scientific questions. They afterwards met at Oxford, and in Gresham College, till that place was turned into at Puritan barrack. After the Restoration, in 1662, the king, wishing to turn men's minds to philosophy -or, indeed, anywhere away from politics-incor

porated the members into what Boyle has called

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the Invisible College," and gave it the name of the Royal Society. In 1710, the Mercers' Company growing tired of their visitors, the society moved to a house rebuilt by Wren in 1670, and purchased by the members for £1,450. It had been the residence, before the Great Fire, of Dr. Nicholas Barebones (son of Praise-God Barebones), a great building speculator, who had much property in the Strand, and who was the first promoter of the Phoenix Fire Office. It seems to have been thought at the time that Newton was somewhat despotic in his announcement of the removal, and the members in council grumbled at the new house, and complained of it as small, inconvenient, and dilapidated. Nevertheless, Sir Isaac, unaccustomed to opposition, overruled all these objections, and the society flourished in this Fleet Street "close" for seventy-two years. Before the society came to Crane Court, Pepys and Wren had been presidents; while at Crane Court the presidents were-Newton (1703-1727), Sir Thomas Hoare, Matthew Ffolkes, Esq. (whose portrait Hogarth painted), the Earl of Macclesfield, the Earl of Morton, James Burrow, Esq., James West, Esq., Sir John Pringle, and Sir Joseph Banks. The earliest records of this useful society are filled with accounts of experiments on the Baconian inductive principle, many of which now appear to us puerile, but which were valuable in the childhood of science. Among the labours of the society while in Fleet Street, we may enumerate its efforts to promote inoculation, 1714-1722; electrical experiments on fourteen miles of wires near Shooter's Hill, 1745 ;

Fleet Street Tributaries.]

ventilation, apropos of gaol fever, 1750; discussions on Cavendish's improved thermometers, 1757; a medal to Dollond for experiments on the laws of light, 1758; observations on the transit of Venus, in 1761; superintendence of the Observatory at Greenwich, 1765; observations of the transit of Venus in the Pacific, 1769 (Lieutenant Cook commenced the expedition); the promotion of an Arctic expedition, 1773; the Racehorse meteorological observations, 1773; experiments on lightning conductors by Franklin, Cavendish, &c., 1772. The removal of the society was, as we have said, at first strongly objected to, and in a pamphlet published at the time, the new purchase is thus described: "The approach to it, I confess, is very fair and handsome, through a long court; but, then, they have no other property in this than in the street before it, and in a heavy rain a man may hardly escape being thoroughly wet before he can pass through it. The front of the house towards the garden is nearly half as long again as that towards Crane Court. Upon the ground floor there is a little hall, and a direct passage from the stairs into the garden, and on each side of it a little room. The stairs are easy, which carry you up to the next floor. Here there is a room fronting the court, directly over the hall; and towards the garden is the meeting-room, and at the end another, also fronting the garden. There are three rooms upon the next floor. These are all that are as yet provided for the reception of the society, except you will have the garrets, a platform of lead over them, and the usual cellars, &c., below, of which they have more and better at Gresham College."

When the society got settled, by Newton's order the porter was clothed in a suitable gown and provided with a staff surmounted by the arms of the society in silver, and on the meeting nights a lamp was hung out over the entrance to the court from Fleet Street. The repository was built at the rear of the house, and thither the society's museum was removed. The first catalogue, compiled by Dr. Green, contains the following, among many other marvellous notices :

"The quills of a porcupine, which on certain occasions the creature can shoot at the pursuing enemy and erect at pleasure.

"The flying squirrel, which for a good nut-tree will pass a river on the bark of a tree, erecting his tail for a sail.

"The leg-bone of an elephant, brought out of Syria for the thigh-bone of a giant. In winter, when it begins to rain, elephants are mad, and so continue from April to September, chained to some tree, and then become tame again.

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"Tortoises, when turned on their backs, will sometimes fetch deep sighs and shed abundance of tears.

"A humming-bird and nest, said to weigh but twelve grains; his feathers are set in gold, and sell at a great rate.

"A,bone, said to be taken out of a mermaid's head.

"The largest whale-liker an island than an animal.

"The white shark, which sometimes swallows men whole.

"A siphalter, said with its sucker to fasten on a ship and stop it under sail.

"A stag-beetle, whose horns, worn in a ring, are good against the cramp.

"A mountain cabbage-one reported 300 feet high."

The author of "Hudibras," who died in 1680, attacked the Royal Society for experiments that seemed to him futile and frivolous, in a severe and bitter poem, entitled, "The Elephant in the Moon," the elephant proving to be a mouse inside a philosopher's telescope. The poem expresses the current opinion of the society, on which King Charles II. is once said to have played a joke.

In 1726-27 Swift, too, had his bitter jeer at the society. In Laputa, he thus describes the experimental philosophers :

"The first inan I saw," he says, 66 was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summeis. He told me he did not doubt that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.' made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder, who likewise showed me a treatise he had written concerning the 'Malleability of Fire,' which he intended to publish.

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"There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method of building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downward to

"While you, great George, for knowledge hunt, And sharp conductors change for blunt,

The nation's out of joint; Franklin a wiser course pursues, And all your thunder useless views,

By keeping to the point."

A strange scene in the Royal Society in 1710 (Queen Anne) deserves record. It ended in the expulsion from the council of that irascible Dr. Woodward who once fought a duel with Dr. Mead inside the gate of Gresham College. "The sense," says Mr. Ward, in his " Memoirs," "entertained by the society of Sir Hans Sloane's services and virtues was evinced by the manner in which they resented an insult offered him by Dr. Woodward, who, as the reader is aware, was expelled the council. Sir Hans was reading a paper of his own composition, when Woodward made some grossly insulting remarks. Dr. Sloane complained, and moreover stated that Dr. Woodward had often affronted him by making grimaces at him; upon which Dr. Arbuthnot rose and begged to be informed what distortion of a man's face constituted a grimace.' Sir Isaac Newton was in the chair when the question of expulsion was agitated, and when it was pleaded in Woodward's favour that 'he was a good natural philosopher,' Sir Isaac remarked that in order to belong to that society a man ought to be a good moral philosopher as well." The house was burnt down in 1877.

The Scottish Society held its meetings in Crane Court. "Elizabeth," says Mr. Timbs, "kept down the number of Scotsmen in London to the astonishingly small one of fifty-eight; but with James I. came such a host of traders and craftsmen, many of whom failing to obtain employment, gave rise, as early as 1613, to the institution of the 'Scottish Box,' a sort of friendly society's treasury, when there were no banks to take charge of money. In 1638 the company, then only twenty, met in Lamb's Conduit Street. In this year upwards of 300 poor Scotsmen, swept off by the great plague of 1665-66, were buried at the expense of the 'box,' while numbers more were nourished during their sickness, without subjecting the parishes in which they resided to the smallest expense.

"In the year 1665 the 'box' was exalted into the character of a corporation by a royal charter, the expenses attendant on which were disbursed by gentlemen who, when they met at the 'Cross Keys,' in Covent Garden, found their receipts to be £116 8s. 5d. The character of the times is seen in one of their regulations, which imposed a fine of 2s. 6d. for every oath used in the course of their quarterly business.

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"Presents now flocked in. One of the corporation gave a silver cup; another, an ivory mallet or hammer for the chairman; and among the contributors we find Gilbert Burnet, afterwards bishop, giving half-yearly. In no very Scotsman-like spirit the governors distributed each quarter-day all that had been collected during the preceding interval. But in 1775 a permanent fund was established. The hospital now distributes about £2,200 a year, chiefly in 10 pensions to old people; and the princely bequest of £76,495 by Mr. W. Kinloch, who had realised a fortune in India, allows of £1,800 being given in pensions of £4 to disabled soldiers and sailors.

"All this is highly honourable to those connected, by birth or otherwise, with Scotland. The monthly meetings of the society are preceded by divine service in the chapel, which is in the rear of the house in Crane Court. Twice a year is held a festival, at which large sums are collected. On St. Andrew's Day, 1863, Viscount Palmerston presided, with the brilliant result of the addition of £1,200 to the hospital fund.”

Appended to the account of the society already quoted we find the following remarkable "note by an Englishman":

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"It is not one of the least curious particulars in the history of the Scottish Hospital that it substantiates by documentary evidence the fact that Scotsmen who have gone to England occasionally find their way back to their own country. It appears from the books of the corporation that in the year ending 30th November, 1850, the sum of £30 16s. 6d. was spent in passages from London to Leith; and there is actually a corresponding society in Edinburgh to receive the revenants and pass them on to their respective districts.

In Crane Court, says Mr. Timbs, lived Dryden Leach, the printer who, in 1763, was arrested on a general warrant upon suspicion of having printed Wilkes's North Briton, No. 45- Leach was taken out of his bed in the night, his papers were seized, and even his journeymen and servants were apprehended, the only foundation for the arrest being a hearsay report that Wilkes had been seen going into Leach's house. Wilkes had been sent to the Tower for his share in producing No. 45. He obtained a verdict of £4,000, and Leach £300, damages from three of the king's messengers, who had executed the illegal warrant. Kearsley, the bookseller, of Fleet Street (whom we recollect by his tax-tables), had been taken up for publishing No. 45, when also at Kearsley's were seized the letters of Wilkes, which seemed to fix upon him the writing of the