ng swordsmen who ruffled it in the Strand. This quondam inn was
also the place where Banks, the showman (so often mentioned by Nash and
others in Elizabethan pamphlets and lampoons), exhibited his wonderful
trained horse "Marocco," the animal which once ascended the tower of St.
Paul's, and who on another occasion, at his master's bidding, delighted
the mob by selecting Tarleton, the low comedian, as the greatest fool
present. Banks eventually took his horse, which was shod with silver, to
Rome, and the priests, frightened at the circus tricks, burnt both
"Marocco" and his master for witchcraft. At No. 11 in this yard--now
such a little world of industry, although it no longer rings with the
stage-coach horn--lived in his obscurer days that great carver in wood,
Grinling Gibbons, whose genius Evelyn first brought under the notice of
Charles II. Horace Walpole says that, as a sort of advertisement,
Gibbons carved an exquisite pot of flowers in wood, which stood on his
window-sill, and shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that
passed beneath. No man (says Walpole) before Gibbons had "ever given to
wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, or linked together the
various productions of the elements with a free disorder natural to each
species." His _chef d'oeuvre_ of skill was an imitation point-lace
cravat, which he carved at Chatsworth for the Duke of Devonshire.
Petworth is also garlanded with Gibbons' fruit, flowers, and dead game.

Belle Sauvage Yard no longer re-echoes with the guard's rejoicing horn,
and the old coaching interest is now only represented by a railway
parcel office huddled up in the left-hand corner. The old galleries are
gone over which pretty chambermaids leant and waved their dusters in
farewell greeting to the handsome guards or smart coachmen. Industries
of a very different character have now turned the old yard into a busy
hive. It is not for us to dilate upon the firm whose operations are
carried on here, but it may interest the reader to know that the very
sheet he is now perusing was printed on the site of the old coaching
inn, and published very near the old tap-room of La Belle Sauvage; for
where coach-wheels once rolled and clattered, only printing-press wheels
now revolve.

The old inn-yard is now very much altered in plan from what it was in
former days. Originally it consisted of two courts. Into the outer one
of these the present archway from Ludgate Hill led. It at one