Peckovers' drudge.

His workshop, it has been mentioned, was in St. John's Square. Of
all areas in London thus defined, this Square of St. John is
probably the most irregular in outline. It is cut in two by
Clerkenwell Road, and the buildings which compose it form such a
number of recesses, of abortive streets, of shadowed alleys, that
from no point of the Square can anything like a general view of its
totality be obtained. The exit from it on the south side is by St.
John's Lane, at the entrance to which stands a survival from a
buried world--the embattled and windowed archway which is all that
remains above ground of the great Priory of St. John of Jerusalem.
Here dwelt the Knights Hospitallers, in days when Clerkenwell was a
rural parish, distant by a long stretch of green country from the
walls of London. But other and nearer memories are revived by St.
John's Arch. In the rooms above the gateway dwelt, a hundred and
fifty years ago, one Edward Cave, publisher of the _Gentleman's
Magazine_, and there many a time has sat a journeyman author of his,
by name Samuel Johnson, too often _impransus_. There it was that the
said Samuel once had his dinner handed to him behind a screen,
because of his unpresentable costume, when Cave was entertaining an
aristocratic guest. In the course of the meal, the guest happened to
speak with interest of something he had recently read by an obscure
Mr. Johnson; whereat there was joy behind the screen, and probably
increased appreciation of the unwonted dinner. After a walk amid the
squalid and toil-infested ways of Clerkenwell, it impresses one
strangely to come upon this monument of old time. The archway has a
sad, worn, grimy aspect. So closely is it packed in among buildings
which suggest nothing but the sordid struggle for existence, that it
looks depressed, ashamed, tainted by the ignobleness of its