An episode about Bacon’s younger days may be pardoned here. The Gray’s Inn Chambers occupied by Bacon were in Coney Court, looking over the gardens and past St. Pancras Church to Hampstead Hill. They are no longer standing. The site of them was No. 1 Gray’s Inn Square. Bacon began to keep his terms at the age of eighteen, in June 1579. His uncle Burleigh was bencher in this inn, and his cousins, Robert, Cecil, and Nicholas Trott, students. In his latter days, when Attorney-General, and even when Lord Chancellor, he retained a lease of his old rooms in Coney Court. He was called to the bar when he was twenty-one, in 1582; and as soon as he was called he appeared in Fleet Street in his serge and bands, as a sign that he was going to practise for his bread. At the close of his first session, however, he was raised to the bench. Bacon always remained attached to Gray’s Inn; he laid out the gardens, planted the elm-trees, raised the terrace, pulled down and rebuilt the chambers, dressed the dumb show, led off the dances, and invented the masques.[227] After Lord Bacon’s disgrace, the first Duke of Buckingham of the Villiers family borrowed the house from Toby Mathew, the courtly archbishop of York, in hopes of a final exchange, which did eventually take place.[228] In 1624, two years before Bacon’s death, a bill was passed to enable the king to exchange some lands for York House, so coveted by his proud favourite. Buckingham soon partially pulled down the old mansion, and lined the walls of his temporary structure with huge mirrors. Here he entertained the foreign ambassadors. Of all his splendour, the only relic left is the water gate usually ascribed to Inigo Jones. This Duke of Buckingham, the “Steenie” of King James, and of Scott’s _Fortunes of Nigel_, was the younger son of a poor knight, who won James I. by his personal beauty, vivacity, and accomplishments--by his dancing, jousting, leaping, and masquerading. At first page, cupbearer, and gentleman of the bedchamber, he rose to power on the disgrace of Carr. It was at York House--“Yorschaux,” as he calls it, with the usual insolence and carelessness of his nation--that Bassompierre visited the duke in 1626. He praises the mansion as more richly fitted up than any other he had ever seen.[229] Yet the duke did not live here, but at Wallingford House, on the site of the Admiralty, keeping York House for pageants and levees, till Felton’s knife severed his evil soul from his body, August 23, 1628. His son, the Zimri of Dryden, was born at Wallingford House. The “superstitious pictures” at York House were sold in 1645,[230] and the house given by Cromwell to General Fairfax, whose daughter married the second and last Duke of Buckingham, of the Villiers line, the favourite of Charles II., the rival of Rochester, the plotter with Shaftesbury, the selfish profligate who drove Lee into Bedlam and starved Samuel Butler.