rare Ben Jonson!” is three times cut in the Abbey; once in Poets’ Corner and twice in the north aisle, where he was buried,—­a little slab in the pavement marking his grave.  Dryden once dwelt in a quaint, narrow house, in Fetter Lane,—­the street in which Dean Swift has placed the home of “Gulliver,” and where the famous Doomsday Book was kept,—­but, later, he removed to a liner dwelling, in Gerrard Street, Soho, which was the scene of his death. (The house in Fetter Lane was torn down in 1891.) Edmund Burke’s house, also in Gerrard Street, is a beer-shop, but the memory of the great orator hallows the abode, and an inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived.  Dr. Johnson’s house, in Gough Square, bears (or bore) a mural tablet, and standing at its time-worn threshold, the visitor needed no effort of fancy to picture that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that afford access to this queer, somber, melancholy retreat.  In that house he wrote the first dictionary of the English language and the characteristic, memorable letter to Lord Chesterfield.  The historical antiquarian society that has marked many of the literary shrines of London has rendered a signal service.  The custom of marking the houses that are associated with renowned names is, obviously, a good one, because it provides instruction, and also because it tends to vitalize, in the general mind, a sense of the value of honorable repute:  it ought, therefore, to be everywhere adopted and followed.  A house associated with Sir Joshua Reynolds and a house associated with Hogaith, both in Leicester Square, and houses associated with Benjamin Franklin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street; Sheridan, in Savile Row; Campbell, in Duke Street; Carrick, in the Adelphi Terrace; Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, and Michael Faraday, in Blandford Street, are only a few of the notable places which have been thus designated.  More of such commemorative work remains to be done, and, doubtless, will be accomplished.  The traveler would like to know in which of the houses in Buckingham Street Coleridge lodged, while he was translating “Wallenstein”; which house in Bloomsbury Square was the residence of Akenside, when he wrote “The Pleasures of Imagination,” and of Croly, when he wrote “Salathiel”; or where it was that Gray lived, when he established his residence in Russel Square, in order to be one of the first (as he continued to be one of the most constant) students at the then newly opened British Museum (1759)....  These records, and such as these, may seem trivialities, but Nature has denied an unfailing source of innocent pleasure to the person who can feel no interest in them.  For my part, when rambling in Fleet Street it is a special delight to remember even so little an incident as that recorded of the author of the “Elegy”—­that he once saw there his contemptuous critic, Dr. Johnson, shambling along the sidewalk, and murmured to a companion, “Here comes Ursa Major.”  For true lovers of literature “Ursus Major” walks oftener in Fleet Street to-day than any living man.