London - Staple Inn

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

"I went astray in Holborn through an arched entrance, over which was Staple Inn." - HAWTHORNE.

Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with the facade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a magician's carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shilling and sixpence, a delightful little history of this "fayrest Inne of Chancerie,"where Johnson lived after finishing his Rasselas in a week to pay for the expenses of his mother's funeral.

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' boardinghouses with the bailiff for the landlord.