passage under a public-house forms the humble entrance to Barnard's Inn, a little Inn of Chancery belonging to Gray's Inn. Again, there are tiny courts with a single tree growing in them, and flowers lining the window sills, divided by a tiny hall with a baby lanthorn, and a line of quaint windows decorated by coats of arms and set in a timber framework.

On the opposite side of the street is Furnival's Inn, which was called after a Sir William Furnival, who once owned the land. It was an Inn of Chancery attached to Lincoln's Inn. Its buildings are shown by old prints to have been exceedingly stately, and were for the most part pulled down in the time of Charles I., and it was entirely rebuilt in 1818. A statue of Henry Peto, 1830, stands in the modern courtyard. Sir Thomas More was a "reader " of Furnival's Inn, and Dickens was residing here when he began his "Pickwick Papers."

Very near this was Scroope's Inn, described by Stow as one of the "faire buildings" which stood on the north side of "Old Borne Hill," above the bridge. It belonged to the Serjeants at Law, but is entirely destroyed.

On the opposite side of the street, close to where St. Andrew's Church now stands, was Thavie's Inn, the most ancient of all the Inns of Court, which in the time of Edward III. was the "hospitium" of John Thavie, an armourer, and leased by him to the "Apprentices of the Law." Its buildings were destroyed by fire at the end of the last century.

Gray's Inn Lane leads from the north of Holborn to Gray's Inn, which is the fourth Inn of Court in importance. It derives its name from the family of Gray de Wilton, to which it formerly belonged. Its vast pink-red court, with

the steep roofs and small-paned windows which recall. French buildings, still contains a handsome hall of 1560, in which, on all festal meetings, the only toast proposed is "the glorious, pious, and inmortal memory of Queen Elizabeth," by whom the members of Gray's Inn were always treated with great distinction.

Sir William Gascoigne, the just judge who committed Henry V. as Prince of Wales to prison for contempt of court; Cromwell, Earl of Essex; Bishop Gardiner; Lord Burleigh; Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the great Lord Bacon, were members of Gray's Inn, as were Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Hall, and Archbishop Laud. Lord Bacon wrote the "Novum Organum " here, a work which, in spite of King James, who declared it was "like the peace of God which passeth all understanding," was welcomed with a tumult of applause by all the learned men of Europe. Dr. Richard Sibbes, who wrote the "Soul's Conflict" and the "Bruised Reed," was a Preacher in this Inn, and died here in one of the courts-he of whom Dr. Doddridge wrote

"Of this blest man let this just praise be given,
Heaven was in him before he was in Heaven."

Gray's Inn is a great quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle, close beside Holborn, and a large space of greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city's very jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up-right in its very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets. Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath."-Hawthorne. English Note Books.

Gray's Inn is described by Dickens in "The Uncommercial Traveller." The trees in Gray's Inn Gardens (now closed to the public) were originally planted by Lord Bacon, but none remain of his time. On the west side of the gardens "Lord Bacon's Mount" stood till lately, answering to his recommendation in his "Essay on Gardens "—" a mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure breast high, to look abroad into the fields." These gardens were a fashionable promenade of Charles II.'s time. Pepys, writing in May, 1662, says—

"When church was done, my wife and I walked to Graye's Inne, to observe the fashions of the ladies, because of my wife's making some clothes."

In 1621 Howell wrote of them as "the pleasantest place about London, with the choicest society," and the Tatler and the Spectator thus speak of them. In their days, however, it will be remembered that Gray's Inn was almost in the country, for we read in the Spectator (No. 269)

"I was no sooner come into Gray's Inn Walks, but I heard my friend (Sir Roger de Coverley) upon the terrace, hemming twice or thrice to himself with great vigour, for he loves to clear his pipes in good air (to make use of his own phrase) and is not a little pleased with any one who takes notice of the strength which he still exerts in his morning hems."

The characteristics of the four Inns of Court are summed up in the distich

"Gray's Inn for walks, Lincoln's Inn for wall,

The Inner Temple for a garden, and the Middle for a hall."

CHAPTER III.

BY FLEET STREET TO ST. PAUL'S.

N passing the site of Temple Bar we are in the City
It separates the City from the Shire,

of London. in allusion to which "Shire Lane" (destroyed by the New Law Courts) was the nearest artery on its north-western side. We enter Fleet Street, which, like Fleet Market and Fleet Ditch, takes its name from the once rapid and clear, but now fearfully polluted river Fleet, which has its source far away in the breezy heights of Hampstead, and flows through the valley where Farringdon Street now is, in which it once turned the mills which are still commemorated in Turnmill Street. Originally (1218) it was called the "River of Wells," being fed by the clear springs now known as Sadler's Wells, Bagnigge Wells, and the Clerks' Well or Clerkenwell, and it was navigable for a short distance. The river was ruined as the town extended westwards. Ben Jonson graphically describes in verse the horrors to which the increasing traffic had subjected the still open Fleet in his day, and Gay, Swift, and Pope also denounce them; but in 1765 the stream was arched over, and since then has sunk to the level of being recognised

as the most important sewer--the Cloaca Maxima—of London.

Having always been considered as the chief approach to the City, Fleet Street is especially connected with its ancient pageants. All the Coronation processions passed through it, on their way from the Tower to Westminster : but perhaps the most extraordinary sight it ever witnessed was in 1448, when Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, aunt of King Henry VI., was forced to walk bare-headed through it to St. Paul's with a lighted taper in her hand, in penance for having made a wax figure of the young king and melted it before a slow fire, praying that his life might melt with the wax.

Just within the site of Temple Bar, on the right of the street, is Child's Bank, which deserves notice as the oldest Banking house in England, still kept where Francis Child, an industrious apprentice of Charles I.'s time, married the rich daughter of his master, William Wheeler the goldsmith, and founded the great banking family. Here "at the sign of the Marygold "—the quaint old emblem of the expanded flower with the motto "Ainsi mon ame," which still adorns the banking-office and still appears in the water-mark of the bank-cheques-Charles II. kept his great account and Nell Gwynne her small one, not to speak of Prince Rupert, Pepys, Dryden, and many others. Several other great Banks are in this neighbourhood. No. 19 is Gosling's Bank, with the sign of the three squirrels (represented in iron-work on the central window), founded in the reign of Charles II. No. 37 is Hoare's Bank, which dates from 1680 the sign of the Golden Bottle over the door, a leathern bottle (such as was used by hay-makers for their