On the 3d of August, a gentleman, Mr. Wedmore, who had promised to be my guide to certain interesting localities, called for me, and we took a hansom for the old city.  The first place we visited was the Temple, a collection of buildings with intricate passages between them, some of the edifices reminding me of our college dormitories.  One, however, was a most extraordinary exception,—­the wonderful Temple church, or rather the ancient part of it which is left, the round temple.  We had some trouble to get into it, but at last succeeded in finding a slip of a girl, the daughter of the janitor, who unlocked the door for us.  It affected my imagination strangely to see this girl of a dozen years old, or thereabouts, moving round among the monuments which had kept their place there for some six or seven hundred years; for the church was built in the year 1185, and the most recent of the crusaders’ monuments is said to date as far back as 1241.  Their effigies have lain in this vast city, and passed unharmed through all its convulsions.  The Great Fire must have crackled very loud in their stony ears, and they must have shaken day and night, as the bodies of the victims of the Plague were rattled over the pavements.

Near the Temple church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain stone laid flat on the turf bears these words:  “Here lies Oliver Goldsmith.”  I believe doubt has been thrown upon the statement that Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some poet ought to have written,

  Where doubt is disenchantment
  ’Tis wisdom to believe.

We do not “drop a tear” so often as our Della Cruscan predecessors, but the memory of the author of the “Vicar of Wakefield” stirred my feelings more than a whole army of crusaders would have done.  A pretty rough set of filibusters they were, no doubt.

The whole group to which Goldsmith belonged came up before me, and as the centre of that group the great Dr. Johnson; not the Johnson of the “Rambler,” or of “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” or even of “Rasselas,” but Boswell’s Johnson, dear to all of us, the “Grand Old Man” of his time, whose foibles we care more for than for most great men’s virtues.  Fleet Street, which he loved so warmly, was close by.  Bolt Court, entered from it, where he lived for many of his last years, and where he died, was the next place to visit.  I found Fleet Street a good deal like Washington Street as I remember it in former years.  When I came to the place pointed out as Bolt Court, I could hardly believe my eyes that so celebrated a place of residence should be entered by so humble a passageway.  I was very sorry to find that No. 3, where he lived, was demolished, and a new building erected in its place.  In one of the other houses in this court he is said to have labored on his dictionary.  Near by was a building of mean aspect, in which Goldsmith is said to have at one time resided.  But my kind conductor did not profess to be well acquainted with the local antiquities of this quarter of London.