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in 1863; Old Furnival's Inn, on the opposite side of Holborn, where Dickens lived when he was first married, has been replaced by the offices of the Prudential Assurance Company, the saviours of Staple Inn, in intense red-brick.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.