A gateway on the north side of Holborn leads to Gray's Inn, the most northerly of the four big Inns of Court. The gardens of Gray's Inn are green and spacious, and its courts and quadrangles have a sober solidity that is very attractive. This Inn affords a welcome retreat from two of the noisiest and most unpoetic thoroughfares in London,--Gray's Inn Road and Theobald's Road. Here is Hawthorne's description of Gray's Inn Gardens: "Gray's Inn is a great quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle close beside Holborn, and a large space of greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster City's very jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up--right in its very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets. Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath." And Charles Lamb also said of them: "These are the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court--my beloved Temple not forgotten--have the gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing. Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks." Bacon (Lord Verulam) planted here not only the spreading elm-trees, but also a catalpa in the garden's north-east corner. In Gray's Inn is also "Bacon's Mount," which answers to the recommendation in the "Essay on Gardens"; "A mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure breast high, to look abroad into the fields." Gray's Inn Walks were, in Stuart times, very rural as well as very fashionable; in 1621 we find them mentioned by Howell as "the pleasantest place about London, with the choicest society"; and the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ alike confirm this statement.