Highways and Byways in London

by Emily Constance Baird Cook

Some of the neighbouring courts are, however, far more unsavoury. See, for instance, "Fleur-de-Lis" Court, off Fetter Lane, a miserable, dilapidated flagged alley. The last time I visited this place, I found a few dirty children dancing to a poor cripple's playing of a kind of spinet or portable piano (some of the "music" of these peripatetic street-players is of a weird kind). Fleur-de-Lis Court!—charmingly named, but, like all courts with such romantic appellations, particularly grimy and squalid. Further up, away from Fetter Lane, where the "court" or narrow alley becomes even more wretchedly ruinous, is a barn-like place labelled "Newton Hall." It seems at a first glance to be the very abomination of desolation; its rusty door padlocked, with an air, too, of never-being-opened. Is there anything, I wondered at a first glance, more dismal in all London? Yet, on looking nearer, I seemed to see something comparatively clean shining on the wall of "Newton Hall," amid the surrounding grime. Can it be,—yes, it is,—a label,—and apparently affixed there within the memory of man: "Positivist Society." Surely, I reflected, the Positivist Cause must be in a bad way, if the dilapidation of the buildings be any guide to the state of the persuasion itself! It is, however, unfair to judge the state of Positivism from Fleur-de-Lis Court, for the whole neighbourhood has, evidently, but a short span of life remaining, and the court and its purlieus will soon be things of the past. Positivism is already removing or removed; and Newton Hall, till Fleur-de-Lis Court is transmogrified in the march of progress into offices or model-dwellings, will rust for some few years in peace.

The neighbourhood in which the old Hall stands is full of historic memories. As is ever the case in crowded Central London, the past, the many pasts, are strangely involved and blended, buried one beneath the other. Dryden and Otway are said to have once lived—and quarrelled—on and near this site. Then, in 1710, Sir Isaac Newton, the then President of the Royal Society, induced that body to buy a house and garden here from Dr. Barebones, a descendant of the "Praise-God-Barebones" of Puritan times. Sir Christopher Wren concurred in the purchase, and £1,450 was paid for the freehold. In this house the Royal Society held their meetings till they removed to Somerset House in 1782; and they built on its garden the present "Newton Hall,"—which hall, some say, is really from the designs of Wren. In 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, unhappy son of genius, gave his last public lectures here; later, it was used as a chapel, and then the Positivist Society made it their home. It is strange to reflect that the chief reason advanced by Sir Isaac Newton to the Royal Society for the purchase of this site, was that it was "in the middle of the town and out of noise."

At the Holborn end of Fetter Lane there are still some fine old gabled houses, which must soon vanish; several little Inns of Chancery, byways out of Holborn and the Strand, have already been swept away: Thavies' Inn for instance, where Dickens, surely by an intentional anachronism, places Mrs. Jellyby's untidy home; Lyon's Inn, near Wych Street, destroyed in 1863; Old Furnival's Inn, on the opposite side of Holborn, where Dickens lived when he was first married, has been replaced by the offices of the Prudential Assurance Company, the saviours of Staple Inn, in intense red-brick. Lastly, Barnard's Inn (originally Mackworth's Inn), a charming little Holborn Inn on a tiny scale, with small courts, trees, a miniature hall and lanthorn, has been bought up by the Mercers' Company and is used by them as a school. This Inn is therefore not now accessible to the casual visitor; its Holborn entrance may, indeed, easily be missed; "Mercers' School," in big gilt letters, adorns its narrow doorway. What a delightful private residence, one thinks, for some rich man, would such a little Inn as this have made! Strange that no rich man has ever thought so! the rich, like sheep, flock ever towards the less interesting West End. Dickens, as I have suggested, had little eye for the purely picturesque; and of this little Inn, compared by Loftie to one of De Hooghe's pictures, he merely says (in Great Expectations,) that it is "the dirtiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for tom-cats!" So much, indeed, is Beauty in the eye of the seer! Barnard's Inn is also remarkable for having been, in the last century, the abode of the last of the alchemists.

A gateway on the north side of Holborn leads to Gray's Inn, the most northerly of the four big Inns of Court. The gardens of Gray's Inn are green and spacious, and its courts and quadrangles have a sober solidity that is very attractive. This Inn affords a welcome retreat from two of the noisiest and most unpoetic thoroughfares in London,—Gray's Inn Road and Theobald's Road.

Here is Hawthorne's description of Gray's Inn Gardens:

"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."

And Charles Lamb also said of them:

"These are the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court—my beloved Temple not forgotten—have the gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing. Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks."

Bacon (Lord Verulam) planted here not only the spreading elm-trees, but also a catalpa in the garden's north-east corner. In Gray's Inn is also "Bacon's Mount," which answers to the recommendation in the "Essay on Gardens"; "A mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure breast high, to look abroad into the fields." Gray's Inn Walks were, in Stuart times, very rural as well as very fashionable; in 1621 we find them mentioned by Howell as "the pleasantest place about London, with the choicest society"; and the Tatler and Spectator alike confirm this statement.

But, alas! Gray's Inn Walks are curtailed, and its gardens deserted enough, at the present day! No more does Fashion walk there, unless it be the "fashion" of the Gray's Inn Road. Many of the solid brick squares are fallen, like Mr. Tulkinghorn's haunt of "Allegory," into comparative decay; others, perhaps, are still more or less substantial; but the grime of many unpainted years of occupation must, one thinks, be more or less conducive to midnight gloom, or even to the before-mentioned complaint of "the 'orrors!" And yet, with all these drawbacks, do not the suites of rooms in the Inn emanate a semi-historic charm, a charm that the newer "flats" can never, never possess? Even apart from mere history, places where people have lived and experienced and suffered, always, I think, breathe a certain humanity.... And I would rather, for my part, have a dinner of herbs in Gray's Inn, in a low-roofed panelled parlour, with windows open on to the green enclosure below, than enjoy all the dainties of the clubs in a "Palace Mansions," with all the newest electric appliances.... I would rather hear the dim echoes of the past in the rustle of the Gray's Inn elm-trees, or the plash of the Temple Fountain, than boast of a theatre agency next door, or live in a West End street of ever so desirable people.... I would rather breathe the sweet and solitary content of a City quadrangle, than the fevered and stormy dissipation of Mayfair ... I would rather....