In the reign of Queen Elizabeth the noble family of De Clifford granted to students of law a little plot of ground at the back of St. Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street, between Fetter Lane and Chancery Lane. ‘There are three things for notice in Clifford’s Inn,’ writes Leigh Hunt: ‘its little bit of turf and trees, its quiet, and its having been the residence of Robert Puttock, author of the curious narrative of “Peter Wilkins,” with its Flying Women. Who he was is not known’—probably a barrister without practice—‘but he wrote an amiable and interesting book.’ As to the sudden and pleasant quiet in the little inn, it is curious to consider what a small remove from the street produces it. But even in the back room of a shop in the main street the sound of the carts and carriages becomes wonderfully deadened to the ear, and a remove like Clifford’s Inn makes it remote or nothing. Charles Lamb’s friend, the absent-minded Dyer, lived in Clifford’s Inn. The garden, now also in danger of being built over, forms part of the area of the Rolls, so called from the records kept there in rolls of parchment. It is said to have been the house of an eminent Jew, forfeited to the Crown—that is to say, that it was most probably taken from him, with all it contained, by Henry III., who made it a house for converts from the owner’s religion. As it may be supposed that most of these converted Jews were of doubtful character, for high-minded men are not to be won from the faith of their fathers by offers of board and lodging, we may imagine there were at one time a good many queer characters knocking about Clifford’s Inn, and life was not a little unconventional. It was so when Wentworth lived there, especially after business hours, when the respectable solicitors having offices on the ground-floor had gone home to Clapham or Highgate to dinner, leaving a few young ne’er-do-wells who lodged about there to run wild on the streets of London, then more full of snares than now, and to return to bed at unhallowed hours. The Serjeants’ Dining Hall has been dismantled; a new street has been cut through the Liberty of the Rolls. There are now few booksellers’ shops in front of St. Dunstan’s Church, and the two wild men of the wood who struck the hour with their clubs on the old church have moved elsewhere. What are we to expect of Clifford’s Inn but that it will soon be a thing of the past?