Sir John Soane started life as an office boy at Reading; he was the Architect of the Bank of England and the Dulwich Galleries; he surrounded himself with a school of young architects, and for their instruction and his own delight ransacked Europe for treasures of art, both antiques and of his own day. The scope of this Collection is as striking as its very high level of excellence. Chippendale furniture, French fifteenth-century glass, a noble architectural library, and many historical curios--these are the least of the lovely things he has given to us. Beautiful bronzes and Greek and Etruscan vases are balanced by the work of Wedgwood and Flaxman; superb illuminated manuscripts by the exquisite Mercury of Giovanni di Bologna, and curious ancient gems, upon one of which a head is cut so cunningly that whichever way you turn its gaze follows you. We pass from the marvellous alabaster tomb of Seti I., King of Egypt about 1370 B.C., and Greek and Roman sculptured marbles, to a room in which first editions of ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ confront Tasso’s manuscript, Reynolds’ sketch-book, and the folios of Shakespeare’s plays which Boswell possessed. And yet we have taken no account of the pictures--of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Snake in the Grass,’ of Canaletto’s ‘Venice’ and Turner’s ‘Van Tromp’s Barge,’ of Watteau’s ‘Les Noces,’ of Raffael’s Cartoons--of a score of pictures and portraits by first-rate artists; and yet there remains that wonderful little room, which is lined by the masterpieces of Hogarth--‘The Election Scenes’ and the ‘Rake’s Progress.’ It is a wonderful place, this London, in which such a treasure-house can lie, unnoticed and almost unvisited, in the centre of an old square in the City. It is somewhat outside the scope of this book to deal with the dwellers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but mention may be made of Thomas Campbell, the poet, who had chambers at No. 61, whilst No. 58 was the House of Forster, the biographer of Dickens, which is described in ‘Bleak House’: ‘Formerly a house of State ... in these shrunken fragments of its greatness lawyers lie, like maggots in nuts.’ More fascinating than all is that ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ which still survives upon a tiny triangular plot amidst the ruin of tenements that have been lately razed to the ground. It proclaims itself the house immortalized by Dickens, and may very well have been the shop which suggested to him the scene of his ‘Old Curiosity Shop.’ It is an ancient building--an old red-tiled cottage, possibly as old as those superb houses of Inigo Jones, ornamented with the Rose of England and the Fleur-de-Lys of France, on the west side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which were put up a year before Charles laid his head upon the block in Whitehall.