GRAY'S INN		SOUTH SQUARE Most visitors cannot find Gray's Inn through the narrow white archway on the north side of High Holborn (a few metres west of Chancery Lane Under-ground station). Immediately on the right are Gray's Inn Chambers, a new block erected by the Inn and principally in use by barristers. Through another narrow archway, surmounted by the griffin, one enters the quiet precinct of South Square, with its lawn, flower beds and statue of Francis Bacon. All the buildings are of red brick and, apart from the Hall, are built in the Georgian style. Practically every building in the Square was destroyed during World War II. The only house to survive was No.1 immediately on the right of the entrance, which bears the date 1759 over the door. A comparison of that house with its neighbours, which bear dates in the 1950's, shows that the original architecture of the Square has been re-created, albeit mostly on a duller scale. In the south-east corner there stood the office of the attorney Edward Blackmore, for whom Charles Dickens, in 1827, at the age of fifteen, worked unhappily as a clerk for 13s. 6d. a week (rising to I 5s.) until he was able to use his pen for better and more lucrative purposes. (In those days the Square was known as Holborn Court.) Dickens lovers, when they have finished their visit to Gray's Inn, should walk a little distance north of it to No.49 Doughty Street, a house occupied by Dickens as a young married man, now a museum, where they may see the actual desk he worked at in Blackmore's office and much else of interest besides. Dickens described Gray's Inn in The Uncommercial Traveller and his contemporary, the American Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote of it in An English Book in words that may still seem apt to the modern visitor: Gray's Inn is a great, quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle ... It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city's very jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up... Nothing else in London is so like the effect of a spell as to pass under one of these archways and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath. At the far end of the neat lawn stands the bronze statue (by F. W. Pomeroy, 1912) of Francis Bacon, essayist, historian, philosopher, statesman, and lawyer, and perhaps the most famous son of Gray's Inn. He occupied chambers in the Inn from 1576 until his death in 1626 and his career in the Society is recorded on the plinth of the statue: Student 1576, Barrister 1582, Reader 1588, Dean of Chapel 1589, Treasurer 1598-1617. Another list records his public service: Member of Parliament for Middlesex 1593, Solicitor-General 1607, Attorney-General 1613, Lord Keeper 1617, Lord Chancellor 1618. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, and became Lord Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban's in 1621. As Lord Chancellor he probably had more influence than any other person in establishing Equity as a vital part of the English legal system. The north side of the Square is dominated by the Hall, with the Treasury office adjoining, in front of which stand four ornamented lead water tanks bearing dates 1702, 1748, 1752 and 1764 now used as jardinieres. The Holker Library occupies the whole of the east side. At No. 11, on the west side are the offices of the Senate of the Inns of Court and the Bar. No.10, rebuilt in 1973, contains the students' common room. Beneath it is the abode of the Head Porter, who is often to be seen about the Inn dressed in black suit and bowler hat. At formal dinners in Hall he carries out his duties wearing a purple gown and carrying a staff bearing a silver griffin.