Francis Bacon was entered by his father, the Lord Keeper, on June 27, 1576, together with his four brothers, Nicholas, Nathaniel, Edward, and Anthony. This was that Sir Nicholas who founded the Cursitor’s Office or Inn, from which Cursitor Street takes its name; Cursitor Street, with its bitter memories of sponging-houses and bailiffs, which have been improved away along with the lumbering machinery of the law that made such things possible. Sir Nicholas had been Treasurer of the Inn in 1536. Francis Bacon, in the dedication quoted below, describes Gray’s Inn as ‘the place whence my father was called to the highest place of justice, and where myself have lived and had my proceedings, and therefore few men are so bound to their Societies by obligation both ancestral and personal as I am to yours.’ An Order in the following year, 1577, directed that all the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon should be ‘of the Grand Company and not be bound to any vacations.’ In the twenty-eighth year of Elizabeth, Francis Bacon was advanced to the Readers’ Table. He was elected Treasurer in 1608.[69] As Solicitor-General he dedicated his ‘Arguments of Law’ to ‘my lovinge friends and fellowes, the Readers, Ancients, Utter Barresters and Students of Graies Inn,’ signing himself ‘your assured loving friend and fellow, F. B.’ It was from Gray’s Inn that the procession of Earls, Barons, Knights and Gentlemen started, which accompanied him to Westminster when he became Lord Keeper. And it was to Gray’s Inn that he returned after his impeachment and fall, coming ‘to lie at his old lodgings,’ and write many of his Treatises and Essays. ‘Those noble studies,’ says Macaulay, the brilliant historian, who himself occupied chambers at No. 8, South Square, in a building that was destroyed to make room for the extension of the Library--‘those noble studies, for which he had found leisure in the midst of professional drudgery and of courtly intrigues, gave to this last sad stage of his life a dignity beyond what power or titles could bestow. Impeached, convicted, sentenced, driven with ignominy from the presence of his Sovereign, shut out from the deliberations of his fellow-nobles, loaded with debt, branded with dishonour, sinking under the weight of years, sorrows and diseases, Bacon was Bacon still.’ He commenced a Digest of the Laws of England, a History of England under the Tudors, a body of Natural History, a Philosophical Romance. ‘He made extensive and valuable additions to his Essays. He published the inestimable treatise, “De Augmentis Scientiarum.” The very trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore the marks of his mind. The best collection of jests in the world is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.’ It is the brain and personality of such a genius that haunts this spacious, quiet square of Gray’s Inn.