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THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
The title of Furnival remained merged in that of Shrewsbury until
1626, when the seventh earl died, leaving only three daughters,
two of
whom died without issue. The youngest, Alethea, married the Earl of
Arundel, and the barony of Furnival became merged into that of Norfolk,
until 1777, when it fell into abeyance between two heiresses, and so continues,
the present Lords Stourton and Petre having equal claims thereto.
Furnival's Inn in London was originally the mansion of the Lords
Furnival.
Stowe mentions William Furnival, Knight, who had in Holborn
two messuages and thirteen shops, as appeareth by record, in the reign of
Richard II.
It was, however, an Inn of Chancery in the gth of Henry IV., and
was sold, early in Elizabeth's time, to the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, who
appear to have formerly had the lease of it.
In Charles I.'s time the greater part of the old Inn described by
Stowe was taken down, but the Gothic hall was standing in 1818, when
the whole was rebuilt by Mr. Peto.
Two famous names in English history are associated therewith :
one,
Sir Thomas More, who was " reader by the space of three "
years and more
in this Inn, and, in more modern days, Charles Dickens, who lived here
from shortly after entering the Reporters' Gallery (1831).
Here, in 1833, he wrote his first
published piece of writing, which
appeared in the January number, 1834, of the old Monthly Magazine.
Down these dark stairs he went, and dropped his paper, as he himself
has described, stealthily one evening, at twilight, with fear and trembling
into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street.*
And he has also told us of his agitation when his paper appeared in
" On which occasion," he " says, I walked down to
all the glory of print.
" Westminster Hall and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes
" were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street,
" and were not fit to be seen there."
He had purchased the Magazine at a shop in the street ;
and exactly
two years after, when the younger member of a publishing firm called
upon him here in his rooms in Furnival's Inn with the proposal that
originated Pickwick, he recognised in him the person he had bought
Magazine from, and whom before or since he had never seen.
that
Here, too, Mr. N. P. Willis, in company with Mr. Macrone, a young
publisher, who had just
Boz for
purchased the conditional copyright of Sketches by
150, visited "the young paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle"
as he calls him, and thus describes his visit :
" In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the
" Bull and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building
* Fester's Life of Dickens.