in 1652.

At present Rosebery Avenue, driven through slumland, justifies its
pleasant-sounding name, being a wide, sweeping, tree-lined road.
Workmen's model dwellings rise on either side.

The northern part of Gray's Inn Road falls within the parish of St.
Pancras. The part which lies to the north of Theobald's Road was
formerly called Gray's Inn Lane. In 1879-80 the east side was pulled
down, and the line of houses set back in the rebuilding. These consists
of uninteresting buildings, with small shops on the ground-floor. On the
west there are the worn bricks of Gray's Inn. At the corner of
Clerkenwell Road is the Holborn Town-Hall, an imposing, well-built
edifice of brick and stone, with square clock-tower, surmounted by a
smaller octagonal tower and dome. The date is 1878.

Gray's Inn Road is familiar to all readers of Dickens and Fielding, from
frequent references in their novels. John Hampden took lodgings here in
1640, in order to be near Pym, at a time when the struggle between the
King and Parliament in regard to the question of ship money was at its
sharpest. James Shirley, the dramatic poet of the seventeenth century,
is also said to have lived here, but was probably in Gray's Inn itself.

GRAY'S INN.

BY W. J. LOFTIE.

An archway on the north side of Holborn, nearly opposite Chancery Lane,
admits us to Gray's Inn. It is not the original entrance, which was
round the corner in Portpool Lane, now called Gray's Inn Road. The Lords
Grey of Wilton obtained the Manor of Portpool at some remote period
from the Canon of St. Paul's, who held it; we have no direct evidence as
to whether the Canon had a house on the spot, but there are some traces
of a chapel and a chaplain. In 1315 Lord Grey gave some land in trust to
the Canons of St. Bartholomew to endow the chaplain in his mansion of
Portpool. From its situation near London, the ready access both to the
City and the country, with the fine views northward towards Hampstead
and Highgate, this must have been a more desirable place of residence
than even the neighbouring manor of the Bishop of Ely. It consisted in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of a gate-house which faced
eastward, the chapel close to it on the left, and various other
buildings, some of them apparently forming separate houses, with
spacious gardens and a windmill. Here the Lords Grey lived for a couple
of centuries in great state, apparently letting or lending the smaller
houses to ten