“The dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for tom-cats.” The locality is referred to in these complimentary terms by Mr. Pip (in the pages of “Great Expectations”), who lived here with his friend Herbert Pocket for a short time when he first came to London. Mr. Joe Gargery’s verdict is worth remembrance:— “The present may be a wery good inn, and I believe its character do stand i; but I wouldn’t keep a pig in it myself, not in the case that I wished him to fatten wholesome, and to eat with a meller flavour on him.” Pip further describes as follows:— “We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half-a-dozen or so), that I had ever seen. . . . A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewed ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus for my sense of sight; while dry rot, and wet rot, and all the silent rots that rot in neglected root and cellar—rot of rat, and mouse, and bug, and coaching stables near at hand besides—addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, ‘Try Barnard’s Mixture.’” Great alterations are now (1899) being carried out; the old buildings—as above referred to by Mr. Pip—have been demolished, and a new and better arrangement of the locality is in active progress for the improvement of the neighbourhood. On the opposite side of Holborn are the handsome and extensive offices of THE PRUDENTIAL ASSURANCE COMPANY. These premises, with their frontage, occupy the site of FURNIVAL’S INN, which has recently disappeared, having been pulled down to make room for the extension of the Assurance offices above referred to—_Sic transit memoria mundi_. Furnival’s Inn was an interesting locality, as associated with the earlier experience of Mr. Dickens himself. Here the young author resided in 1835, the year previous to the production of the “Pickwick Papers,” the first number of that work being published April 1, 1836. On the day following that notable date, Mr. Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth; and for some time the young couple resided on the third floor apartments at _No._ 15 _Furnival’s Inn_—on the right side of the square. A personal reminiscence of these early days is no doubt intended in chapter 59 of “David Copperfield;” a pleasant description being there given of the residential chambers of Mr. and Mrs. Traddles, as located in Gray’s Inn just beyond.