"Now Holborn, for example, is quite easy to reconstruct, though I daresay the imaginary form isn't a bit like the original.

But there are fragments left, like Staple Inn and the front of Gray's Inn; and then one has seen prints of the old Middle Row and some of the taverns, so that one has some material with which to help out one's imagination.

But this road that we are walking in always baffles me.

It looks so old and yet is, for the most part, so new that I find it impossible to make a satisfactory picture of its appearance, say, when Sir Roger de Coverley might have strolled in Gray's Inn Walks, or farther back, when Francis Bacon had chambers in the Inn." "I imagine," said I, "that part of the difficulty is in the mixed character of the neighbourhood.

Here, on the one side, is old Gray's Inn, not much changed since Bacon's time--his chambers are still to be seen, I think, over the gateway; and there, on the Clerkenwell side, is a dense and rather squalid neighbourhood which has grown up over a region partly rural and wholly fugitive in character.