When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,” go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carved oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. At the back of the Patent Offices that make the southern boundary of Staple Inn is Took’s Court--the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby of _Bleak House_ lived--once a place of those curious semi-prisons called sponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailiff for the landlord. [Illustration: Staple Inn] Took’s Court is a sordid enough place now, and some of it may soon disappear, but it has a vicarious interest because Sheridan spent some of the last years of his life in a sponging-house here. GRAY’S INN “Whene’er through Gray’s Inn porch I stray I meet a spirit by the way; I roam beneath the ancient trees, And talk with him of mysteries; He tells me truly what I am-- I walk with mighty Verulam.” Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that few of London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in the Gray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, and it is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on the Central London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens more freely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped his _Essays_ in your pocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the very garden that he made. Bacon was once Treasurer of Gray’s Inn and he interested himself in the laying out of “the purest of human pleasures” that he found there. Gray’s Inn Gardens used to be as fashionable a place for a walk as Hyde Park is to-day. Pepys the Chatterer related the doings of numberless people when he wrote: “When church was done my wife and I walked to Gray’s Inn to observe fashions of the ladies, because of my wife’s making some clothes.” Pepys must have gone there very often, for two months later the frivolous Secretary wrote: “I was very well pleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk in Gray’s Inn Walks.” Times have changed and fine ladies are no longer allowed to walk in Gray’s Inn Gardens, unless indeed they have relations among the benchers who are complaisant in the matter of keys. [Illustration: GRAY’S INN HALL] The Hall is the oldest and most beautiful thing in Gray’s Inn. Queen Elizabeth once came to a banquet here, and it was here that the _Comedy of Errors_ was first performed. The old Inn has had many famous names among its members, the Sydneys, Cecils, Bacons, etc., and a man no less distinguished in another circle, Jacob Tonson, had his first bookshop just inside Gray’s Inn Gate.