The old bookseller and publisher’s name has a very modern interest, even for the London visitor who never turns the pages of Pope or Walpole, because his house at Barn Elms is now used as the Ranelagh Club. The people who go out to Ranelagh of a fine afternoon to drink tea and watch the polo, are following the footsteps of the members of the famous Kit-Cat Club founded in 1700, it is popularly supposed as an outcome of the dinners Tonson offered to his patrons. The club, of which Tonson became secretary, consisted of thirty-nine members--authors, wits and noblemen--their portraits hang in the halls of the Ranelagh Club to-day. Tonson published for Addison and Pope, and was the first man to print cheap editions of Shakespeare. He had innumerable friends, and his portrait shows him as a genial creature who must have merited the description of him, written in 1714, that I found in _Old and New London_: “While in your early days of reputation, You for blue garters had not such a passion; While yet you did not live, as now your trade is, To drink with noble lords and toast their ladies, Thou, Jacob Tonson, were to my conceiving, The cheerfullest, best, honest fellow living.” Tonson moved from the Gray’s Inn Gateway in 1712 to his more celebrated bookshop in the Strand that stood on part of the present site of Somerset House. I hear that another old landmark connected with this prince of publishers is doomed to disappear, for the Upper Flask, in Heath Street, Hampstead, that was known in Tonson’s day as the “Upper Bowling Green House,” used as the summer quarters of the Kit-Cat Club, may have to give way to the new buildings of some philanthropic institution. Gray’s Inn takes its name from the Grays of Wilton. There is a document registering the transferring in 1505 of the “Manor of Portpoole, otherwise called Gray’s Inn” from Edmund Lord Gray of Wilton to a Mr. Denny. The public, alas, are never admitted to the Gardens, but any visitor may see the Hall on a week-day between the hours of 10 and 12.15. HATTON GARDEN “My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there.” _Richard III._ Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn are not the only old-world souvenirs to be found in prosaic Holborn. A little further east, on the left-hand side as one strolls towards the City, lies another sordid street whose name is redolent of Elizabethan romance. Hatton Garden, named after the queen’s handsome chancellor and now the haunt of the diamond and pearl merchant, and also of organgrinders and ice-cream vendors, is built on the site of the gardens of Ely Palace, the town house of the Bishops of Ely whose story is noted on another page. Round the corner is Ely Place, the most astonishing little square in London.