Besides all this there are wonderful Flemish wood carvings and manuscripts, and, in the crypt, the interesting three-thousand-year-old tomb of Seti I., King of Egypt, whose inscriptions Sir John did not live to see deciphered. There was an air of wistfulness about the place. It had been arranged with so much loving care, and so few people profit by it though the reward of going is great. Perhaps Sir John Soane did not want anybody but art-lovers to see his collection, or he would surely not have closed it to the public on Saturday, Sunday and Monday all the year round and for the entire months of September, December, January and February. It is true that students and other visitors may apply to the curator for admission at other times, and foreigners are admitted on presentation of their visiting card on any day except Sunday and Bank Holidays, but what Londoner, with richer collections open every day in the week, could be expected to remember the capriciousness of the guardians of Sir John Soane’s treasures, who are like the suburban hostess announcing her reception days as first and third Tuesdays and fifth Friday? In despair of remembering when the good lady was at home, you would never call on her. No, if you want to see the Hogarths, my advice is to wrap yourself in the cloak of a foreigner and present your card at the door of this neglected London museum between the hours of ten and five. LINCOLN’S INN “The Walks of Lincoln’s Inn Under the Elms.” BEN JONSON. Lincoln’s Inn Fields are bordered on the east side by Lincoln’s Inn, but I like better to approach the old squares by the brick gatehouse in Chancery Lane. It is the oldest part of Lincoln’s Inn, and a very fine example of Tudor brickwork. The Sir Thomas Lovel who built it in 1518 put his own arms over the gateway, never dreaming that when his name would mean nothing to the passer-by, the name of a bricklayer, one Ben Jonson who worked, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, at the adjoining buildings about a hundred years later, would need no coat of arms to preserve his memory. People like Mr. Muirhead, who see things in the light of cold reason, argue that in 1617 Jonson was forty-four and already famous, so he had probably laid down the trowel,--but I prefer to believe old Fuller, who said Ben Jonson helped in the building of the new structure in Lincoln’s Inn. There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since the thirteenth century--the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll in their shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London where you can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery and recapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thought incompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things.