of "Pickwick" first became on terms of friendship with
many of the brilliant men of letters of his day. The knocker is held in
its place by a fleur-de-lis of the same metal, and it was Serjeant
Talfourd who humorously rallied Dickens on his supposed predilection for
the French, who at that time were in the midst of preparing that series
of more or less revolutionary movements which preceded the downfall of
Louis Philippe and the ascendency of the third Napoleon.

[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON'S. (Bolt Court, Fleet Street.)]

But an older and more characteristic door-knocker may be found well
within a mile of Doughty Street, still on the door of a house once
inhabited by the great sage Dr. Samuel Johnson himself. Surely if any
knocker is characteristic of its owner this one is. It represents a
sturdy fist clenching a baton from which depends a bulky wreath of
laurel fastened in the middle by a lion's head. The worthy doctor, as we
are told by Boswell, carried no key, nor did he permit any member of his
oddly-selected household to possess one. At all times and seasons the
house in Bolt Court was inhabited, and unquestionably the burly knocker
resounded in the ears of the inhabitants of the court often enough, and
at unseemly hours, for the sage was not at all scrupulous as to what
hours he kept, and many a time would talk irregularly on at the club
until some of his neighbours had serious thoughts of rising.

[Illustration: CRUIKSHANK'S. (Hampstead Road, N.W.)]

The contemporaries of the great caricaturist George Cruikshank during a
fruitful period of his life will gaze not without feelings of emotion on
the accompanying representation of the familiar knocker on his house in
the Hampstead Road.

It was Clarkson Stanfield who, calling upon his friend Cruikshank one
day, had much ado in making the artist's aged servant aware that a
visitor awaited at the portals; again and again he knocked, but in vain;
the servant's deafness was proof against the onslaughts of a vigorous if
not wholly artistic door implement. At last, losing all patience, he
picked up the foot-scraper and was about to impetuously hammer away at
the panels, when the caricaturist, hastily throwing up an upper window
sash, recognised and appeased his indignant visitor.

"You should," remarked Stanfield, "get a younger servant, or a heavier
knocker, or else build your house in Turkish fashion--that is, without
doors."

[Illustration: THE KNOCKER THAT SUGGE