CHAPTER V

STAPLE INN

HE wet streets and sidewalks of London, glistening under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of quicksilver escaping everywhere, are always a delight to

me. When with these I get a background of and I always do -flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the haze of mist and smoke, my delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start your foreground say a figure, or umbrella, or a cab with a stroke of jet black, and the perspective instantly fades into grays of steeple, dome or roof, so delicate and vapoury that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky.

And charcoal is again the one only medium which will express it. Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal, the individual medium. No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes, nor mixing of tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a small pocket pencil, held flat between the thumb and forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let go." Yes, one thing more care must be taken to have this thumb and forefinger fastened to a sure, know

ing and fearless hand, worked by an arm which plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm, kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge such as composition drawing, mass and light and shade is then turned on.

Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal sketch, covering and containing all a man can see and he should neither record nor explain anything more is not completely finished in three hours, it can never be finished by the same man in three days or three years.

And London is the best place I know for practising the art especially if it be raining, and there was no question that it was raining on this particular morning in Holborn, when Evins backed his taxi into a position from which I could get the old Staple Inn pitched forward against a luminous gray sky, its gables reflected in a stream of silver, the sidewalk and broad road thronged with pedestrians picking their way amidst an endless procession of wheeled traffic.

The Inn itself I had sketched the year before that is the garden part of it, especially the row of time-blackened buildings holding the rooms where Mr. Grewgious in "Edwin Drood" had his office. Its staggering street front was, however, new to my coal.

St. Bartholomew's Church might have been debatable ground, but here I am sure of my facts. Opposite Staple

Inn stands, or did stand but a few years ago, the famous old Furnivals Inn, where Dickens had his quarters, and where he wrote the opening chapters of "Pickwick." Hither Thackeray betook himself one fine morning with a portfolio of sketches under his arm. He had read the first numbers of that immortal book, and as he was convinced he would never amount to anything as an author himself, he had come to beg of Dickens the chance to earn an honest penny as an illustrator. Mr. Dickens was just entering into that great fame as a writer of fiction which has never dimmed from that time. The young artist had scarcely attempted literature, and had still to tread the paths of obscurity. Some years later, when both men were famous, Thackeray told the story at a dinner of the Royal Academy at which Mr. Dickens was present.

"I can remember when Mr. Dickens was a very young man, and had commenced delighting the world with some charming humorous works in covers, which were coloured light green and came out once a month, that this young man wanted an artist to illustrate his writings; and I recollect walking up to his chambers in Furnival's Inn, with two or three drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find suitable. But for the unfortunate blight which came over my artistical existence, it would have been my pride and my pleasure to have endeavoured one day to find a place on these walls for one of my performances."

It was not until a year had passed that Thackeray began seriously to devote himself to literary labour; and his articles, published over a nom de plume, contain the best evidences that he felt no shadow of ill-will for a rejec

tion which he always good-humouredly alluded to as "Mr. Pickwick's lucky escape."

As to the Inn itself, we learn that the front, shown in my sketch, dates from the latter part of the sixteenth century; and the outer buildings and courtyard from between 1729-59. That it used to be known as "le Stapled Halle,' and was, in its origin, the house of a guild in some way responsible for the collection of the duties on wool-the data ending with the announcement that in one of the top rooms quite under the roof in fact - Dr. Johnson wrote "Rasselas."

In 1884 the freehold was sold, and the insurance company across the way took possession, and I am inclined to think with a certain sense of their responsibilities. Perhaps their conscience had begun to smite them after they had wiped dear old Furnival's Inn off the planet, erecting in its stead a modern combination of brick, stone, and slate. For, when they looked Staple Inn over, they then and there, God bless them! resolved to prop it up as best they could, to keep it from sprawling its full length on the sidewalk. And a very creditable restoration it is.

This, let me say, applies only to the partly modernized street front. Once inside the gateway, and back you go hundreds of years, three hundred I am sure in the second court where Mr. Grewgious earned his bread-or tried toin some chambers over the main door of a dull building, mouldy with grime, its windows blinking in the gloom of the desolate garden, set out with seats, and miserable, droopy, disheartened trees which stand aimlessly about. A queer gate leads out somewhere into the unknown (to me) sug