the house in whose first-floor our ETTY lived and
painted for years). I was one of a select few,
I vainly plumed myself, who had explored the
dark arches of the Adelphi at three in the morning,
who knew that Salisbury-street was not a
cul-de-sac guarded by a railing, but that a staircase
— a staircase, oh ye fugitives!— led down to
the foreshore of the Thames; one of a few who
had walked on the Adelphi-terrace, and had
noted that odd, embossed house at the corner of
Adam and John streets. I flattered myself that
few of my standing had imbibed porter among
the jovial coalheavers at that mysterious hostelry
called the " Fox under the Hill," or had shared
with very early risers, and the ladies and gentlemen
in the habit of frequenting the old stage
door of the Strand Theatre, the knowledge that
in Strand-lane are the old Roman baths,
subsequently patronised by Her Majesty Queen Anne,
and from which, the legends tell, a duct runs to
the deep well of the "Old Dog," in Holywell-street.
So men live for years, and fancy they
are aware of the things around them, and of the
strangest know nothing at all. Wellington,
despite an apocryphal anecdote and a dubious
engraving, never met Nelson; Mr. Howe dined
for years in the house opposite to the residence
of the wife he had so unaccountably deserted;
and at least one eminent tragedian is profoundly
ignorant of the very existence of his rival. How
first I came to know the Precinct I can scarcely
tell, and matters but little. It may have been
on a mooning expedition, some solitary Sunday
afternoon in the old time, when I had, properly,
nothing to do, and, improperly, nowhere to go,
and when it was my custom to wander up and
down, and be thankful for what new localities
turned up. It may have been, and I incline
rather to this last theory, on some hot July afternoon,
when meeting my friend, Tom Shrooder,
and proposing to him cool refreshments, with
straws, and ice, and lemon-peel galore, at the
Divan, he laughed the idea of such expensive
luxuries to scorn, and quoth:

"In such a thermometrical state, no honest
man drinks anything but shandy-gaff. And,
save at the Grinning Ape, at Walton-on-the-Naze,
there is no drinkable shandy-gaff in
England equal to Mrs. Turniptop's, at the Precinct
Palace."

Now, Tom Shrooder knows the world as Bride-lane
knows its betting-book, and a bill-discounter
his Boyle's Court Guide and Army
List. I had but to acquiesce in Shrooder's
suggestion (he was hopelessly briefless here, went
out to New Atlantis Island, under favour of my
Lord Baconrind, and is now Chief Justice of the
colony), but I could not help asking, humbly,
where the Precinct was?

"Not know the Precinct!" cried Thomas,
with a long whistle and a longer stare. " What
an innocent, what a child of nature, what an
unsophisticated griff you must be! The
Precinct is the shadiest haunt in London. Shaded
from the sun by architecture; shaded from the
sheriff by happy obscurity; and, now that they
have unsanctuaryised Whitefriars and the Mint,
it is one of the few places in London where a
man, so long as he hold his tongue, can hide his
head. Presto! Come to the Precinct." And,
somehow or other, Tom Shrooder spirited me
away from a Hansom cab accident, from an
omnibus, even from a van— with a brass band in
it—proceeding to Highbury Barn; from a
fire-engine, from all the turmoil and jangling of the
Strand; and three minutes afterwards we were
seated at the open window of the Precinct
Palace's first-floor, sipping our shandy-gaff, and
gazing at the chequered light and shade in the
green old churchyard. Yes; I think that must
have been my earliest introduction to the
pleasant place.

I am almost ashamed to admit, now— when,
after much hesitation and many misgivings as to
being blackballed, I have had my name put up
at the Podasokus Club— that the Precinct Palace
is neither more nor less than a public-house. It
is a highly respectable tavern, but it cannot
be denied that the landlord is a licensed
victualler and wears an apron, and that the place
itself is a " public." But it was so long long
ago that I visited it, I plead; and the Podasokus
wasn't built then; and respectable people used to
drop in sometimes at taverns, they used indeed.
I am writing of a region, far behind the time;
and ere these lines are printed a law may be
passed creating cabarets and wine-shops that may
one day supersede taverns in toto, and leave
the Precinct farther behind than ever. Be it as
it may, it is impossible to know anything of the
Precinct without frequenting the " Palace."
Turniptop, the landlord, strongly asseverates
that his hostel forms actual part and parcel of
the ancient edifice itself. He appeals in
corroboration of his statement to common, oral
tradition, to his lease, which (as that parchment is
kept securely locked up in a tin box together
with his license, and a copy of the Morning
Advertiser containing a report of his famous
victory over a malevolent police sergeant who
summoned him, A.D. 1850, for an infringement
of the law in entertaining the members of the
Cauliflower Club after midnight one Saturday,
and who was shamefully nonsuited by one of
the ablest magistrates that ever sat on the
bench) must be considered testimony irrefragable,
but not easily accessible. Turniptop,
indeed, puts forward other proofs. He
frequently produces a volume of the Mirror for
1832, in which is a woodcut representing an
ancient gateway, not in the least resembling
the modest brick tenement now licensed as the
"Precinct Palace;" and he points triumphantly
to a certain jagged stone in the wall, down stairs
by the kitchen-boiler, as a relic of mediæval
times. By the way, there is a legend that the
whole Precinct was once sacked and burnt by
the Kentish rebels under Jack Cade or Wat
Tyler, I forget which; and a portion of Turniptopian
inspiration may be due to a reminiscence
of the man who was wont to point to a brick in
the chimney as an unanswerable proof that the
house he lived in had once been inhabited by
Jack Cade.