Its hall, which dates from 1560, is little inferior to any hall in all the Inns of Court. It has carved wainscoting, and a timber roof, and windows emblazoned with the arms of Lord Bacon and Lord Burleigh. In Milton’s time, Gray’s Inn marked the northern limit of the town, and all beyond it was green fields and country lanes. Therefore we now turn south and west to explore briefly the numerous other inns that must often have echoed to the steps of Milton when he lived almost within stone’s throw of them.
Dickens’s description of the little Staple Inn gives the reader an exact impression of the place to-day: “Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long since run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which, out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter on smoky trees, as though they called to each other, ‘Let us play at country,’ and where a few feet of garden mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks that are legal nooks; and it contains a little hall with a little lantern in its roof.”
Walking through the further quadrangle, and following the narrow street down past the towering, vulgar conglomeration of every incongruous architectural device,—the new Birkbeck Bank,—we enter presently the wide spaces of Lincoln’s Inn.
The style of buildings, whether new or old, is largely Tudor of the type of Hampton Court. The walls of red brick are inlaid with diagonal lines of darker bricks. The chapel, of Perpendicular Gothic, built by Inigo Jones, is raised on arches which leave a kind of open crypt below, where Pepys tells us he used to walk. The stained glass windows antedate Laud’s time, and Laud is said to have wondered that the saints emblazoned on them escaped the “furious spirit” that was aroused against those “harmless, goodly windows” of his at Lambeth.
At number 24 of the “Old Buildings,” the secretary of Oliver Cromwell lived from 1645 to 1659, where his correspondence was discovered behind a false ceiling. The tradition that the Protector was overheard to discuss with him here about the kidnapping of the three little sons of Charles I. may be dismissed as mythical.
Beside the noble brick gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, which bore the date 1518, it is said that rare Ben Jonson, in his early days of poverty, was found working with a trowel in one hand and his Horace in the other, when some gentlemen, having compassion on him, as did Cimabue on the gifted child, Giotto, rescued him, and let loose the imprisoned genius who found Shakespeare for a friend, and the Abbey for his tomb.
Of Furnivall’s, Scroope’s, and Barnard’s Inns, and Thavie’s, oldest of them all, we have no space to write. The characteristics of the four great inns are stated in the lines:
“Gray’s Inn for walks, Lincoln’s Inn for wall,
The Inner Temple for a garden,
And the Middle for a hall.”
The modern sightseer finds, as probably Milton found, much more of interest in the two latter, which lie south of Fleet Street, than in all the others combined.
Before crossing Fleet Street, mention should be made of Temple Bar, which was erected by Wren four years before Milton’s death, and marked the transition from Fleet Street to the Strand. The “Old Cheshire Cheese” in the ancient and dingy Wine Office Court, which opens north from Fleet Street, probably was built a dozen years before Milton died. It was Doctor Johnson’s restaurant, and his fame brings many customers to sit in his old seat, which is still carefully preserved.