[Illustration: STAPLE INN, HOLBORN.] Leigh Hunt, in that most delightful of all books about London, _The Town_, tells us that No. 7 Craven Street, Strand, was once the dwelling of Benjamin Franklin, and he adds, with the manliness which is always such a curious element of his unmanliness: “What a change along the shore of the Thames in a few years (for two centuries are less than a few in the lapse of time) from the residence of a set of haughty nobles, who never dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a tradesman, to that of a yeoman's son, and a printer, who was one of the founders of a great state!” Not far away in one of the houses of Essex Street, Strand, a state which led in the attempted dismemberment of that great state, and nearly wrought its ruin, had a formal beginning, for it is said that it was there John Locke wrote the constitution of South Carolina, which still, I believe, remains its organic law. One has one's choice among the entirely commonplace yellow brick buildings, which give the street the aspect of an old-fashioned _place_ in Boston. The street was seriously quiet the afternoon of our visit, with only a few foot-passengers sauntering through it, and certain clerklike youth entering and issuing from the doors of the buildings which had the air of being law-offices. We used as a pretext for visiting the Temple the very attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church. But when we had climbed to the triforium by the corkscrew stairs leading to it, did we find there tombs and tablets? I am not sure, but I am sure we found the tomb of that Edward Gibbon who wrote a _History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, and who while in Parliament strongly favored “distressing the Americans,” as the king wished, and made a speech in support of the government measure for closing the port of Boston. I did not bear him any great grudge for that, but I could not give myself to his monument with such cordial affection as I felt for that of the versatile and volatile old letter-writer James Howell, which also I found in that triforium, half-hidden behind a small organ, with an epitaph too undecipherable in the dimness for my patience. It was so satisfactory to find this, after looking in vain for any record of him at Jesus College in Oxford, where he studied the humanities that enabled him to be so many things to so many masters, that I took all his chiselled praises for granted.