THE OLD CARVING AT CLIFFORD'S INN

SOME eighteen years ago when I first settled in London

I lived in Thanet Place, a quaint little courtyard on the Temple side of Fleet Street, which has long since been swept away. It was while living there that I wandered up the dingy obscure passage by St. Dunstan's Church, and, discovering Clifford's Inn, conceived a desire to live there. Accordingly, one morning when London was shrouded in a dense fog, I went to see the only man I knew in the Inn, my old friend Mr. Emery Walker, and he not only told me of these vacant rooms at No. 3, but was good enough to show me round them. I still remember that morning very vividly. Mr. Walker lit matches innumerable to show me what it was impossible to see without, namely, that all the doorways, cornices, and the fireplace were richly decorated with wonderful carving attributed to Grinling Gibbons. The rooms had been empty for some years, and I was told by Mr. George Booth, who then represented the Society of Clifford's Inn, that they had not been let for fear a tenant might injure the woodwork. This fear was not without reason, because when I took possession unsightly hat-pegs disfigured all the panels and much damage had been done. In earlier days the room illustrated had been used for the dinners of the Society, and there was at that time a magnificent mahogany dining table to be seen, and also some fine Chippendale chairs. After I had been accepted as a tenant the dinners were held in the hall, and when these dinners were ultimately abandoned I remember buying

this table, and it came back to its old quarters. To go back, though, I may say that I was so fascinated by the rooms that I took no count of the fact that I had no furniture to put in them or money to buy it with! For a long while the Grinling Gibbons carving looked down on a deal kitchen table, and a kitchen chair lent me by the good-natured head porter, and, with little else but these, I used to sit and write. The beautiful carving was furniture enough. It was some time before I set to work acquiring articles more or less in keeping with the old-world place. Then for twelve or thirteen years I made myself very snug in this little eddy out of Fleet Street, and I might be there still, but for the fact that when Mr. Willett bought the Inn I was given notice to leave in order that the carvings, which were not included in that sale, might be sold apart. I went to this sale with a faint hope of acquiring my old surroundings, but the South Kensington authorities had a longer purse, and "my" room is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Clifford's Inn in those old days was a delightful little corner in the heart of the city, and it included many interesting residents. Of these the most distinguished was Samuel Butler, the author of "Erewhon," and of that little-known story, "The Way of All Flesh"-one of the most brilliant books of recent times. He came often to No. 3, and it was in these rooms that I had the pleasure of introducing to him a man who had long wanted to meet him—namely, Richard Whiteing. The little overgrown garden still exists in the larger square, and the pink hawthorn still struggles into bloom over the shaky gate, but the Inn lost much of its glory when it parted with this beautiful example of a great artist's work.

F. F.

THE ROLLS HOUSE AND CHAPEL

THOSE who, like Dr. Johnson, love to walk

in Fleet Street, not because it is the direct road to the Bank, but as a field for the " contemplative man's recreation," cannot but have observed a row of dull-looking brick houses on the east side of Chancery Lane, extending northwards from Old Serjeants' Inn, that are now doomed to destruction. They are ugly enough to look at, and though they doubtless contain good honest work and, maybe, some fine carving of panel and staircase, there is but little to regret in their destruction; and yet we feel that it will snap asunder yet another link with a past, little removed indeed from us in point of date, but so widely different from our own times in Rais Chapel fashion, manners and feeling, and moreover so pregnant with the seeds of that future which has become our present, that the study of its features must ever be a source of interest to us.

We must not look for "massive deeds, and great," and far less for ornaments of rhyme" in the builders or inhabitants of those eighteenth-century houses. They were a matter-offact, thrifty, honest, hardworking race, who, to quote an old