one of his immediate descendants. It is surmounted by a coronet, and may be described heraldically as, gules, a chevron between three crosses botonnée or. The church of St. Bartholomew the Great, after getting into a bad state of dilapidation, has of late years been elaborately restored. The acquisition by the authorities of St. Bartholomew's Hospital of a piece of the ground lately occupied by the Blue-Coat School will lead sooner or later to a general reconstruction of Rahere's foundation, and the church of St. Bartholomew the Less is fated soon to disappear. It is within the boundary of the hospital, and has a Gothic tower much modernised which contains one or two interesting monuments.

Leaving this classic neighbourhood, we will now revisit, alas! only on paper, a delightful house of entertainment, the old Bell, on the north side of Holborn, one of many formerly to be found in that thoroughfare; it survived, however, to be the last galleried inn on the Middlesex side of the river. The following brief account of it was written when the building still remained intact, being founded on a careful examination of original documents relating to the property.

The earliest mention of this house which appears

in the deeds is on the 14th of March 1538, when William Barde, for £40, sells a messuage with garden called the Bell, in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, to Richard Hunt, citizen and girdler. This Richard Hunt, who died in 1569, gave thirty sacks of charcoal yearly for ever, as a charge on the property, to be distributed on St. Thomas's Day to thirty poor persons, now represented by an annual payment of £2:5s. from the ground landlords to St. Andrew's parish. In a deed poll of 1605 it is described as being "in the suburbes of the cittie of London, between the tenement sometime of John Davye on the east, and a tenement heretofore of the Prior and convent of the late dissolved Pryorie or Hospitall of our Ladie without Bishopsgate on the west; one head thereof extending upon the Kinges high waye of Holborne, and the other head thereof upon the garden of Elie place," the London house of the Bishops of Ely, the chapel of which, dedicated to St. Etheldreda, still exists. As shown in Agas's well-known plan, drawn probably about the year 1590, the garden of Ely House extended as far as Leather Lane and a considerable distance along it, leaving only space for the houses in Holborn with their enclosures, of which the Bell seems distinctly to be shown.

YARD OF OLD BELL INN, HOLBORN,

FROM THE NORTH, 1897

The Bell Inn, on the north side of Holborn, is first mentioned in a deed of 1538. The galleried structure to the left dated probably from the reign of Charles II. The building in front was of the early eighteenth century. The little statuette in a niche represented the first Napoleon.