CHAPTER VTHE INNER TEMPLE

‘Those bricky towres,The which on Themmes brode aged backe doe ryde,Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,There whylome wont the Templar Knights to byde,Till they decayed thro’ pride.’

There is nothing, however, to prove that Spenser was referring to Brick Court. The ‘Prothalamion’was published in 1596; and I would suggest that the phrase ‘bricky towres’ might apply most naturally to the Middle Temple Hall.

Of all the Chambers in the Inns of Court rich in reminiscences of famous men, none are so redolent of literary fame as No. 2, Brick Court. We cannot, as Thackeray[32]wrote, who himself, like Winthrop Mackworth Praed, had chambers here, pass without emotion ‘the staircase which Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their kind Goldsmith—the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak door.’

Not the Temple, but No. 6, Wine Office Court, nearly opposite the Cheshire Cheese, was the scene of Dr. Johnson’s famous rescue of the author of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ who had been arrested by his landlady for his rent, and sent for his friend in great distress. ‘I sent him a guinea,’ says Johnson, ‘and promised to come to him directly.... I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means bywhich he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds.’

Goldsmith left Wine Office Court and lodged for a while in Gray’s Inn, and thence migrated to some humble Chambers upon the site of No. 2, Garden Court, Middle Temple (1764). These buildings have disappeared. But the success of his play, ‘The Good-Natured Man,’ for which he received £500, enabled him to launch forth into more splendid apartments. He purchased the lease of No. 2, Brick Court, which still stands as he left it, for £400. He furnished his rooms with mahogany and Wilton carpets, and, bedecking himself in a suit of ‘Tyrian bloom satin grain,’ prepared to entertain his most aristocratic acquaintances. Johnson, Percy, Reynolds, Bickerstaff, and a host of other friends of either sex, climbed those stairs to the rooms on the second floor on the right-hand side (‘two pair right’), were entertained to dinners and suppers, much to the discomposure of the studious Blackstone, who, painfully compiling his great ‘Commentaries’ in the chambers below, found good cause to grumble at the racket made by ‘hisrevelling neighbour.’[33]And some years later the staircase that led to the rooms of that most lovable of geniuses was crowded by friends, ‘mourners of all ranks and conditions of life, conspicuous among them being the outcasts of both sexes, who loved and wept for him because of the goodness he had done.’[34]For from these rooms, one April afternoon, the mortal remains of Oliver Goldsmith were borne forth, to be buried somewhere on the north side of the Temple Church. The exact spot is not known, but as near to it as can be ascertained a plain gravestone now bears the inscription (1860): ‘Here lies Oliver Goldsmith.’ The Goldsmith Buildings, that run parallel to the north side of the Church, belong, like Lamb Buildings, somewhat unexpectedly to the Middle Temple, but they have no immediate connection with Oliver Goldsmith.

The bedroom in Goldsmith’s Chambers Thackeray describes as a mere closet, but he commented upon the excellence of the carved woodwork in the rooms. The windows looked upon a rookery, which for long flourished in the elm-trees, since cut down, which gave their name to Elm Court. Gazing upon this colony, Goldsmith, in the intervalsof composing his ‘Traveller’ or ‘Deserted Village,’ would note their ways, and so recorded them in his ‘Animated Nature’:[35]‘The rook builds in the neighbourhood of man, and sometimes makes choice of groves in the very midst of cities for the place of its retreat and security. In these it establishes a kind of legal constitution, by which all intruders are excluded from coming to live among them, and none suffered to build but acknowledged natives of the place. I have often amused myself with observing their plan of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks upon a grove where they have made a colony in the midst of the City....’

In recent years many of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar have had Chambers in Brick Court, including Lord Coleridge, Lord Bowen, Lord Russell, and Sir William Anson. There is a sundial in this Court—one of the many for which the Inn is famous—from which Goldsmith may often have taken the hour. It warns us that Time and Tide tarry for no man, and took the place (1704) of one that bore the motto, ‘Begone about your business,’ of which the story goes that it was a Bencher’s curt dismissal of a Mason who asked him for the motto to be engraved thereon.

The Buildings in the Inns grew up in haphazardfashion. They were erected by individual members or Benchers at their own cost, and interspersed with stalls and shops, with the sanction of the Benchers. The builders were granted the right of calling their blocks of chambers after their own names, if they chose, and of nominating a certain number of successors from among members of the Society, who might become tenants without paying rent to the Inn.

To this haphazard method of building, and to the influence of numerous fires, is due the devious labyrinth of little Courts, the inextricable maze of blocks of Chambers, which lie upon our left as we descend Middle Temple Lane, and which lend so peculiar a character to the Temple Inns. Pump Court, Elm Court, Fig-Tree Court, which fill the spaces between the Lane and Wren’s Cloisters and the Inner Temple Hall, owe their irregular shape to these causes, and their titles to the chief features of the plots about which they were built.

First comes Pump Court, where Henry Fielding, the novelist, and Cowper, the poet, once had chambers. Upon its old brick walls is a sundial with its warning motto: ‘Shadows we are, and like shadows depart.’[36]The great fire of 1679,which damaged the Middle Temple far more than the Fire of London, broke out at midnight in Pump Court. It raged for twelve hours. The Thames was frozen, and barrels of ale, so tradition runs, were broached to feed the pumping engines in lieu of water. Pump Court, Elm-Tree Court, Vine Court, the Cloisters, and part of Brick Court were consumed. The Church and Middle Temple Hall were only saved by the timely use of gunpowder, a device that had been found effective in the Great Fire of 1666.

Elm Court Buildings, as they now are, date from 1880. They are built of good red brick and stone, but marred by feeble Renaissance ornament. They boast a sundial, facing the Lane, which proclaims that the years pass and are reckoned—pereunt et imputantur. The Middle Temple Lane ends in the atrocities of the nineteenth century: between the walls of the feeble Harcourt Buildings, the stock-brick ugliness of Plowden Buildings, which have rather less architectural charm than a soap-factory, and in the dreadful Temple Gardens and the Gateway which opens upon the Embankment, a gross abomination of florid ugliness.

On the right, below Brick Court, beneath a gas-lamp raised upon a graceful iron arch, some steps

FOUNTAIN COURT AND MIDDLE TEMPLE HALL

lead us to a raised pavement, dotted with a few plane-trees, beyond which lies the Fountain. This pavement is the forecourt of the Middle Temple Hall, a building which, in spite of restorations and recasings and counter-restorations, remains of unique and unsurpassed interest. For now that Crosby Hall is to be translated, it is the only building leftin situin London which can be directly and certainly connected with William Shakespeare. The Middle Temples had an ancient Hall between Pump Court and Elm Court, the west end of which abutted upon Middle Temple Lane. This was superseded in 1572 by the present famous building.

‘Gray’s Inn for walks,Lincoln’s Inn for a wall,The Inner Temple for a garden,And the Middle for a Hall.’

The old doggerel lines fairly sum up the features of the Inns. And this lovely Hall of the Middle Temple, whose proportions are so fair—it is 100 feet by 42 feet by 47 feet high—produces a delightful impression of space and lightness. A magnificent timber roof with Elizabethan hammer-beams harmonizes with the rich panelling, on which are painted the arms of ‘Readers,’ and the gorgeous carving of the Renaissance Screen, which waserected in 1574, some fourteen years before the date of the Spanish Armada, from the spoils of which fond tradition says it was constructed.

The Hall is very rich in heraldry, and has some interesting portraits, chiefly of royal personages. Above the Bench Table hangs Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I. The windows illustrate the survival of Gothic detail long after other details had passed into the Italian style. The points are very slight, but contrast sharply enough with the Renaissance curves and pendent roof. There is some modern stained glass, tolerable in colour, but incongruous in style.

Parliament Chamber and the Benchers’ rooms are approached through old carved oak doors, relics of the old Hall in Pump Court.

The Entrance Tower was designed by Savage (1831): the Louvre was restored by Hakewill. An oil-painting, attributed to Hogarth, of the Hall Court, with the Entrance Tower of the Hall in its ancient state, is to be seen in the Benchers’ Committee Room of the Inner Temple.

One of the most splendid Refectories in England, comparable to the Hall of Christ Church at Oxford, this noble room adds to the charm of its beauty the charm of a literary memorial. For from thisstage the exquisite poetry and gentle fun of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ first fell upon the ears of the listening lawyers upon occasion of a Christmas Revel three hundred years ago. Here Shakespeare himself, we must believe, has trodden; those rafters rang once with the poet’s voice. For even if he did not act himself in his play that night of wonderful Post-Revels—and that, in spite of tradition, is indeed scarcely probable, for the dramas performed on these occasions were, as we have seen, acted by members of the Inn—yet it is more than probable that he would be employed as Stage-Manager for the occasion, and would take his natural part in rehearsing the play.

It so happens that one John Manningham—a fellow-student, by the way, of John Pym—kept a diary of his residence in the Temple from 1601 to 1603. That diary has been preserved among the Harleian Manuscripts now in the British Museum. And on February, 160½, he made a note which will cause his name to live for ever. ‘At our feast,’ he wrote, ‘Wee had a play called “Twelve Night, or What you will,” much like the “Commedy of Errores,” or “Menechmi” in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called “Inganni.”[37]

And to this stately Hall, we may be sure, came Elizabeth, surrounded by a brilliant group of statesmen, lawyers, sailors, to witness such plays, or perchance to lead the dance with some comely courtier like Sir Christopher Hatton. The connection of the Middle Temple with the great Elizabethan Admirals and Adventurers is indeed noteworthy.

Sir Francis Drake was honourably received by the Benchers in this Hall after his victories in the West Indies (1586), and in the Hall, below the daïs, is a serving-table made out of the timber of his ship, theGolden Hind. He had been admitted,honoris causa, to the Society of the Inner Temple four years earlier. Other famous Elizabethan seamen were admitted at the Middle Temple in the persons of Sir Martin Frobisher, Admiral Norris, Sir Francis Vere (all in 1592), and Sir John Hawkins (1594). Taken in conjunction with the fact that Richard Hakluyt, the elder, was a Bencher of the Middle Temple; that Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been admitted to membership of the Inn in 1575, placed the expedition he sent out in 1602 under the command of Bartholomew Gosnold, another Middle Templar; that the records show that several members of the Middle Temple were interested in the early development of Virginia;and that the Inn possesses the only existing copy of the ‘Molyneux Globes,’ this and other indications seem to justify Mr. Bedwell’s contention[38]that ‘the colonizing enterprises of the closing years of the sixteenth century were closely associated with the Middle Temple,’ and that on both sides of the Atlantic members of that Inn took a prominent part in the ‘birth of the American Nation.’

This connection with the Colonies, natural, necessary and profitable both to those new countries, which thus obtained the services of educated men—Governors trained in knowledge of affairs, and Attorney-Generals imbued with the high traditions of English Law—and to the Inns themselves, which were thus kept in touch with the New World, is illustrated by the fact that the Middle Temple is represented by no less than five of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Of these, Thomas McKean is said to have written the Constitution of Delaware in a single night. And of the other four, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Lynch, Thomas Heyward, and Arthur Midleton—all Representatives of South Carolina—the first is believed to have drafted the greater part of theConstitution of that State, and was afterwards Chairman of the Committee of Five who drafted the first Constitution of the United States.

Meanwhile the literary and dramatic tradition of the Middle Temple was continued by such members of the Society as Congreve, Wycherley, Ford, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Shadwell, King William’s Poet Laureate, who lives in Dryden’s Satire. Later, that tradition was continued by Sheridan, Thomas Moore, Thomas de Quincey, and Henry Hallam, the historian of the Middle Ages.

Since 1688, when a change was made in the oath of supremacy, which, by a statute of 1563, all Utter Barristers were required to take, the names of the members of the Inns of Court who are entitled to practise in the Courts have been preserved in the Barristers’ Roll. Since 1868 barristers have been excused the oath, but the Roll must still be signed after call to the Bar. The lists are kept in the Public Record Office.

The names of eminence inscribed upon this wonderful Roll can only be hinted at here. The Middle Temple can boast such great lawyers as Edmund Plowden and Blackstone, and Lord Chancellors in Clarendon, Jeffreys (who was a student here, but called to the Bar at the InnerTemple), Somers, Cowper, and Eldon; whilst Mansfield, C.J., Lord Ashburton, Robert Gifford, Lord Stowell, Lord Campbell, Cockburn, the Norths, and the Pollocks, were men and lawyers of no less eminence. Nor must we omit to mention one whose undying fame was earned, not in the Courts, but in the Camp; for Sir Henry Havelock, the hero of Cawnpore and Lucknow, figured among the Templars ere he went to India. Of another kind of eminence was Elias Ashmole, the Antiquary, whose name lives at Oxford. In the destructive fire of 1678 he lost in his rooms at the Middle Temple his papers, books, and rich collection of coins and medals. His friend, John Evelyn, the diarist, also had rooms in the Middle Temple, in Essex Court, just over against the Hall Court (1640).

The north wing of Essex Court, which forms part of Brick Court, was rebuilt in 1883;[39]the remainder of these charming brick buildings, with the Wigmaker’s shop, belong to the second half of the seventeenth century.

Though the Gateway which leads to Middle Temple Lane is the grander, there is another entrance by ‘the little Gate,’ which is still more charming and characteristic. Screened by the tortuous ways of Devereux Court, an old wrought-iron gate opens onto an ancient and spacious quadrangle.

As we stand beneath the old brick buildings of this ‘New Court’—so ‘new’ that it was built by Sir Christopher Wren (1677)—the whole charm of the Temple scenery unfolds before our eyes, and we understand at once the ‘cheerful, liberal look of it’ which Charles Lamb loved.

For below us lies the most unique and one of the loveliest views in London, a city of beautiful vistas. A flight of steps, framed by ancient iron standards bearing the sign of the Lamb, leads down to a Fountain in the centre of a broad paved terrace. And through the trees that shade it we catch glimpses of green lawns and flower-beds hedged about by Hall and Library and Chambers. Here still, beneath the shady trees—though Goldsmith’s rooks no longer caw in them—sparkles the water of the Temple Fountain, though the Fountain itself is not that which provoked Lamb’s wit, nor that which Dickens loved. It was through thesmoky shrubs of Fountain Court that the delicate figure of Ruth Pinch flitted, in fulfilment of her little plot of assignation with Tom, who was always to come out of the Temple past the Fountain and look for her ‘down the steps leading into Garden Court,’ to be greeted ‘with the best little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the Fountain, and beat it all to nothing. The Temple Fountain might have leaped twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood that in her person stole on, sparkling, through the dry and dusty channels of the Law; the chirping sparrows, bred in Temple chinks and crannies, might have held their peace to listen to imaginary skylarks, as so fresh a little creature passed; the dingy boughs, unused to droop, otherwise than in their puny growth, might have bent down in a kindred gracefulness, to shed their benedictions on her graceful head; old love letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which, in their degeneracy, they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered with a moment’s recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by.’[40]

From the Fountain Terrace we look down upon a terraced garden framed by various blocks of buildings, which, if they do not group and harmonize so as to form a perfect whole, yet produce an effect which is quite singular and has a charm of its own. Beneath the Terrace, on the left the west end of the Hall abuts upon a green lawn; on the right a flight of steps leads down to a path which skirts the not unpleasing gabled façade, in red brick and stone, of the Garden Court (1883). Facing us now, are the steps which lead up to the embattled Lobby of the Library, beneath which an archway leads to the Library Chambers facing Milford Lane. Hence a private gate leads out into the Lane, where are the steps to Essex Street, remains of the old Water Gate of Essex House. The left-hand side of the green parallelogram of garden is formed by those ugly Plowden Buildings, for which the only hope is that they may soon be buried in the decent obscurity of Virginia Creeper, which can cover a multitude of architectural sins, and the still uglier Temple Gardens, and the Gateway, for which there is no hope at all.

In Dugdale’s time the Middle Temple Library, owing to the fact that it always stood open, had been completely despoiled of books. The present

MIDDLE TEMPLE LIBRARYOnthe left are the buttresses of Middle Temple Hall.

MIDDLE TEMPLE LIBRARY

Onthe left are the buttresses of Middle Temple Hall.

building, in the Gothic style by H. R. Abraham, is ugly in itself, its proportions, especially when viewed from the Embankment, being painfully bad. Its height is far too great for its length and breadth, and this is due to the fact that two stories of offices and chambers are beneath the Library Room, which is approached by a charming outside staircase. The Library itself, which is 86 feet long, is a beautiful room with a fine open hammer-beam roof. It was opened on October 31, 1861, by King Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, who was called to the Bar and admitted as a Bencher of the Middle Temple on the same day.

Mr. Loftievery justly observes of the Middle Temple that ‘Its Lawn seems wider, its trees are higher, its Hall is older, its Courts are quainter, than those of the other member of this inseparable pair.’ The Middle Temple has, indeed, been unkindly compared to a beautiful woman with a plain husband. This comparison, however, is far from just. For though its beauty is perhaps less obvious and has been much impaired by the ravages of modern builders, yet the Inner Temple remains alocus classicusfor the fine beauty of the Jacobean and Queen Anne styles, and across its green lawn the view of the Embankment, the River, and Surrey Hills—too often, alas! shrouded in smoke—is extremely delightful. Moreover, the heart of the Inner Temple presents the engaging completeness of a Collegiate Building. The Church and Master’s House on the North; the Cloisters on theWest; the Buttery, Refectories, Hall, and Library on the South; the Master’s Garden, the Graveyard and Garden of the Inn on the East, form just such a Court or Quadrangle as delights the eye at Oxford or Cambridge.

I have spoken of the Inner Temple Gateway. In King’s Bench Walk—once known as Benchers’ Walk—the Inner Temple can boast a row of typical Jacobean mansions, with handsome doorways,[41]which look upon a broad and classic avenue of trees. Nor can an Inn, which records the names of Sir Edward Coke and of John Selden amongst its members, and which was the home of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, be reckoned inferior to any in the fame and interest of itsalumni.

Dr. Johnson moved from Staple Inn to Gray’s Inn, and from Gray’s Inn to No. 1, Inner Temple Lane (1760). Here, in a spot so favourable for retirement and meditation, as Boswell calls it, in a house whose site is indicated by the ugly block of Johnson’s Buildings (1851), were those rooms which have been so vividly described by the great man’s admirers. Here, in two garrets over his chambers, his library was stored, ‘goodbooks, but very dusty and in great confusion.’ Here was housed an apparatus for the chemical experiments in which he delighted, whilst the floor was strewn with his manuscripts for Boswell to scan ‘with a degree of veneration, supposing they might perhaps contain portions of the “Rambler” or of “Rasselas.”’It was in his chambers here on the first floor, furnished like an old counting-house, that the uncouth genius received Madame de Boufflers—received her, no doubt, clad, as usual, in a rusty brown suit, discoloured with snuff, an old black wig too small for his head, his shirt collar and sleeves unbuttoned, his black worsted stockings slipping down to his feet, which were thrust into a pair of unbuckled shoes. And then, when he began to talk, ‘with all the correctness of a second edition,’ all thought of his slovenly appearance and his uncouth gestures vanished; the knowledge and the racy wit of the man triumphed. We see the lady, fascinated by the great man’s conversation, bowed out of those dirty old rooms, whilst the ponderous scholar rolls back to his books. Then her escort hears ‘all at once a noise like thunder.’ It has occurred to Johnson that he ought to have done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality.

Eager to show himself a man of gallantry, he hurries down the stairs in violent agitation. ‘He overtook us,’ says Beauclerc, ‘before we reached the Temple Gate, and, brushing in between me and Madame de Boufflers, seized her hand and conducted her to the coach.’ To the bottom of Inner Temple Lane came the devoted Boswell, and took chambers in Farrar’s Buildings—now rebuilt (1876)—in order to be near to the object of his biographical enthusiasm. Another name famous in Literature the Inner Temple can boast. Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, was a Member of this Inn, and in 1612 he wrote the Masques performed by this Inn and Gray’s Inn before King James at Whitehall, in honour of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Count Palatine of the Rhine. This Masque he dedicated to Sir Francis Bacon, who represented Gray’s Inn in its preparation.

The grey walls of Paper Buildings; the plain yellow brick of Crown Office Row; the stock-brick of Mitre Court, the Goldsmith Buildings that have supplanted the dingy attic of No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, which looked through the trees upon the (now vanished) pump in Hare Court, are none of them buildings which in themselves canstir any emotion but repulsion, but they have a lasting charm and interest, for they are the sites of the homes of Elia; they are haunted by the ‘old familiar faces’ of Charles Lamb and his friends.

Charles Lamb first saw the light in No. 2, Crown Office Row, ‘right opposite the stately stream which washes the garden-foot,’ and there passed the first seven years of his life. ‘Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said, for in those young years what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?—these are of my earliest recollections.’

The name of these buildings was derived naturally enough, because, at least from the days of Henry VII., the Clerk of the Crown occupied the Crown Office in this Inn until its removal to the Courts of Justice in 1882. The eastern yellow brick half of the row, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, was built in 1737, the western half, Nos. 4, 5, and 6, of stone in the Italian style, in 1864, by Sydney Smirke. The Row no longer extends to No. 10, where Thackeray had chambers, sharing them possibly with Tom Taylor, before he migrated to No. 2, Brick Court.

Of his old Chambers here Taylor wrote withaffectionate regret when he heard of the ‘bringing low of those old chambers, dear old friend, at Ten, Crown Office Row.’

‘They were fusty, they were musty, they were grimy, dull, and dim,The paint scaled off the panelling, the stairs were all untrim;The flooring creaked, the windows gaped, the doorposts stood awry,The wind whipt round the corner with a wild and wailing cry.In a dingier set of chambers no man need wish to stow,Than those, old friend, wherein we denned at Ten, Crown Office Row.’

The present Mitre Court Buildings date from 1830. At No. 16, in the old block, Charles Lamb once lived (1800), preferring ‘the attic story for the air.’ ‘Bring your glass,’ he writes to a friend, ‘and I will show you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river, so as by perking upon my haunches and supporting my carcass upon my elbows, without much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of King’s Bench Walk, as I lie in my bed.’ In Fuller’s Rents, now replaced by Nos. 1 and 2, Mitre Court Buildings, the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s favourite, andSir Edward Coke, the great Chief Justice, once had chambers (1588ff.).[42]

Coke was a Bencher before he became Chief Justice and wrote upon Lyttleton. Sir Thomas Lyttleton (author of the famous ‘Treatise on Tenures’) is the first name upon the list of the Benchers of the Inner Temple.

A heavy iron gate, shut at night, marks the entry to Mitre Court and what was formerly Ram Alley. Between the North side of Mitre Court Buildings and the entrance to Serjeants’ Inn are the remains of a small garden, marked by a few sickly trees. Beyond, is a passage leading into Serjeants’ Inn, which is approached by a flight of steps, and is shut off from Mitre Court by a door, which at the present day is seldom, if ever, closed. Through this private way of his, the lines of which can still be traced, the compact and wiry figure of the great Lord Chief Justice, Coke, might often have been seen passing between the two Inns.[43]

From 1809 to 1817 Charles Lamb lived at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, a house that has been replaced by part of the ugly Johnson’s Buildings. ‘It looks out,’ he says, ‘upon a gloomy churchyard-like Court,called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it. I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump, when I was a Rechabite of six years old.’

‘That goodly pile of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,’ as Lamb facetiously calls it, succeeded Heyward’s Buildings, where Selden laboured. Paper Buildings were burnt down in 1838, thanks to the carelessness of Sir John Maule, the eccentric Judge, who left a candle burning by his bedside. Both he and Campbell, afterwards Chancellor, lost everything in the flames.

In Paper Buildings George Canning, the Statesman, and Samuel Rogers, the poet, had chambers, and Lord Ellenborough also (No. 6). The present block, by Smirke, contains the chambers of another Prime Minister in Mr. Asquith. The Inner Temple can boast yet another Premier in George Grenville, who became Prime Minister (1763) in the same year as he was elected Bencher.

The name of Edward Thurlow, the rough-tongued, overbearing Lord Chancellor, is unhappily connected, like that of Grenville, with the policy which resulted in the loss of our American Colonies.

Thurlow had chambers in Fig-Tree Court, the smallest and most dismal of these legal warrens inthe Temple. He died in 1806, and was buried in the Temple Church.

Amongst other great lawyers who had chambers in Paper Buildings, Stephen Lushington, Edward Hall Alderson, and Sir Frank Lockwood must be named.

Paper Buildings form the Western boundary of the ‘Great Garden,’ which, indeed, before the erection of buildings here, used to extend to King’s Bench Walk. It stretched from Whitefriars to Harcourt Buildings and Middle Temple Lane, and from the Hall to the river wall, and if it has been narrowed by Paper Buildings, it has been elongated by the successive embankments of the River. Always carefully cultivated and planted with shrubs and roses, it remains, little altered by the passing centuries, one of the sweetest and most grateful of things—a trim garden in the midst of a grimy town. This is the scene chosen for that great and growing Flower Show, which is one of the most popular and pleasing of the social functions of the London season. The great wrought-iron gate opposite Crown Office Row is a magnificent specimen of eighteenth-century craftsmanship. It will be noticed that it bears, in addition to the winged Horse, the arms of

HALL AND LIBRARY, INNER TEMPLECrown Office Rowis on the left, Paper Buildings on the right. The Gardens run right down to the Thames Embankment, and are the scene of the Temple Flower Show.

HALL AND LIBRARY, INNER TEMPLE

Crown Office Rowis on the left, Paper Buildings on the right. The Gardens run right down to the Thames Embankment, and are the scene of the Temple Flower Show.

Gray’s Inn—a compliment to the ancient ally of this Inn, which was returned upon the gateway of Gray’s Inn Gardens, and over the arch of the Gatehouse leading to Gray’s Inn Road. It was upon the neighbouring terrace that the Old Benchers, of whom Lamb wrote so pleasingly, used to pace. Immediately within the railings is a sundial, which dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Of these ‘garden gods of Christian gardens, these primitive clocks, the horologes of the first world, there is a delightful profusion in the Temple. Best known of all of them, perhaps, is that which is borne by a kneeling black figure in a corner of the garden near the foot of King’s Bench Walk. It was brought here from Clement’s Inn. The oft-quoted epigram, which was one day found attached to this Blackamoor, is feeble enough:

‘In vain, poor sable son of woe,Thou seek’st the tender tear;From thee in vain with pangs they flow,For mercy dwells not here.From cannibals thou fled’st in vain;Lawyers less quarter give—The first won’t eat you till you’re slain,The last will do’t alive.’

Occasionally as I pass these many sundials, shrouded in the yellow haze of London fog, orscarce visible through the murk upon the dark walls of narrow Courts, I find myself repeating Edward Fitzgerald’s mot, when, after a wet week spent with James Spedding at Mirehouse, he gazed reflectively upon the sundial in the garden there, and observed: ‘Itmusthave an easy time of it.’

Fires, frequent and disastrous, have destroyed nearly all the old buildings in the Inner Temple. Only the Church and a fragment of the Hall survive from medieval days. The Great Fire (1666), which left the Middle Temple almost unscathed, wrought devastation in the Inner. The Inn was then rebuilt with great rapidity, the erection of Chambers being left to the enterprise of Members, as before, whilst the Society as a whole devoted itself to the construction of the Library and Moot-Chamber beneath. In the fire of 1678 the old Library was blown up with gunpowder in order to save the Hall.

The present Inner Temple Hall is a crude, pseudo-Gothic structure, which was designed by Sydney Smirke, and was opened by the Princess Louise in 1870. It supplanted the restored and tinkered remains of the old Hall. For the ancient Refectory of the Knights Templarsstood in the time of Henry VII. on the same site as this Hall, and does, indeed, form the nucleus of it.[44]The Clock Tower, at the East end of the Library, which forms one side of the nondescript Tanfield Court, perpetuates an ancient tower, which was surmounted by a turret built of chalk, rubble, and ragstone, like the Church, and carried a bell under a wooden cupola. It stood near to this spot, and was attached to the Treasurer’s house. The feeble architecture of the exterior is agreeably at variance with the fine interior of the Hall, with its open timber roof and handsome screen. Upon the panelled walls, like those of the Middle Temple Hall, are painted the coats of arms of past Treasurers and Readers, in perpetuation, as it were, of the old custom of the Knights Templars, who used to hang their shields upon the walls when they sat two by two at dinner in the old Hall, wherein, as the Accusers averred, the Novices of the Order were compelled to spit upon the Cross, to kiss an Idol with a black face and shining eyes, and to worship the Golden Head kept in the Treasury adjoining. The doors in the panelling at the East End lead now to nothing more thrillingthan Parliament Chambers—‘a handsome set of rooms, the walls of which are covered with portraits and engravings of legal luminaries.’[45]

In the minstrel gallery hang some old drums and banners, which serve to remind us of the martial achievements of the Lawyers, when ‘forth they ride a-colonelling.’ Two very richly carved doors at the north and south entrances to the Hall, one of which bears the date 1575, are reasonably supposed to be surviving fragments of the great carved screen, said by Dugdale to have been erected in the Hall in 1574.

The four fine bronze statues of Knights Templars and Knights Hospitallers are by H. H. Armstead (1875). The Hall is rich in portraits. Beneath a large painting of Pegasus are portraits of King William III. and Queen Mary, of Queen Anne, George II., and Queen Caroline. Portraits of Sir Edward Coke and Sir Thomas Lyttleton, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Randolph Carew, and Sir Simon Harcourt, among others, hang upon the walls.

The old Hall of this, as of the other Inns, was frequently the scene of Revels and Merry-making.[46]Here, as elsewhere, Christmas Feasts formed prominent incidents in the life of the Society, and one such has been described by Gerard Leigh (1576), when the guests were served ‘with tender meats, sweet fruits and dainty delicates confectioned with other curious cookery ... and at every course the Trumpeters blew the courageous blast of deadly War, with noise of drum and fyfe; with the sweet harmony of Violins, Sackbutts, Recorders and Cornetts, with other instruments of music, as it seemed Apollo’s harp had tuned their stroke. Thus the Hall was served after the most antient of the Island.’ And it was in the old Hall of the Inner Temple that the first performance of the first English tragedy took place in 1561. This was ‘Gorboduc; or Ferrex and Porrex,’ and it was written by two distinguished members of thisSociety: Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. A hundred years later Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Lord Chancellor and Earl of Nottingham, ‘the Oracle of Impartial Justice,’ gave in this Hall the most magnificent ‘Reader’s Feast’ upon record.

King Charles came in his barge from Whitehall, with his Court, and was received at the Stairs by the Reader and the Lord Chief Justice in his scarlet robes. He passed into the Temple Garden through rows of Readers’ servants, clad in scarlet cloaks and white Tabba doubtlets, and the Gentlemen of the Society in their gowns, whilst music and violins sounded a welcome to His Majesty. The Duke of York was also present upon this occasion, and so delighted was he with the entertainment that he, together with Prince Rupert, was at once admitted to the Society, and presently became a Bencher.

Sir Heneage Finch was the most famous of a long line of distinguished members of that family who have been Benchers. It is characteristic of the Inner Temple that it has and always has had a tendency for members of the same families to supply the vacancies among the Benchers. The Pollocks, Wests, Wards, and Finches point backto a long roll of ancestors distinguished in the Law and the annals of the Temple. This tendency coincides with the aristocratic nature of the Society. For many centuries a candidate for Bencher was required to show at least three generations of ‘gentle blood,’ a regulation which affords a curious contrast to the more democratic nature of Oxford and Cambridge. In Elizabeth’s reign it was ordered that ‘none should be admitted of the Society, except he were of good parentage and not of ill-behaviour.’ Such another Inner Temple family was that of the Hares, who lived for generations in Hare Court, the south side of which was built by Nicholas Hare about 1570. Hare Court, together with the rooms once occupied by Chief Justice Jeffreys, has been recently rebuilt. A doubtful portrait of that ferocious Judge by Sir Peter Lely was presented to the Inn by Sir Harry Poland, K.C.

The exterior of the Library Building is not imposing. It contains on the ground and first floors the Parliament Chambers, offices, and lecture-rooms, and on the second floor a very fine library, admirably arranged in a room perfectly suited to the student.

Very early indications of a Library existing withchambers under it are found in the records. It stood at the west end of the Hall. A later building, apparently, at the east end of the Hall was afterwards used as the Library, and was rebuilt in 1680, after having been destroyed by gunpowder in 1678 in order to save the Hall from the fire in that year.

The north wing, upon the site of No. 2, Tanfield Court, was opened in 1882. A case containing a collection of ‘Serjeants’ Rings’ is of some interest. In the anteroom to the Parliament Chambers hangs a portrait of William Petyt, a former Treasurer of the House and Keeper of the Records at the Tower, who bequeathed his exceedingly valuable collection of historical documents, etc., to the Inn. A fine piece of carving by Grinling Gibbons, as it is supposed, which is placed in this anteroom also, bears the inscription ‘T. Thoma Walker Arm.A.D.1705,’ and was the result of a payment of £20 5s. made by Sylvester Petyt, Principal of Barnard’s Inn and brother of William, as executor of the latter’s will.[47]

The narrow alley that leads from Fleet Street through Mitre Court and Mitre Buildings, gives little promise of the broad open expanse of gravel

NO. 5, KING’S BENCH WALK, INNER TEMPLEA doorway, probably by Sir Christopher Wren.

NO. 5, KING’S BENCH WALK, INNER TEMPLE

A doorway, probably by Sir Christopher Wren.

walks, sparsely dotted with plane-trees, and narrowing down to a distant glimpse of gardens, and of the River beyond, to which it guides our feet.

This stretch of gravel walks is enclosed on the west by Paper Buildings and on the east by the buildings of the King’s Bench Walk. The lower half of the latter, below the gateway leading into Temple Lane, and facing the Gardens, dates from 1780, and is quite devoid of architectural merit or even any pretence to it; but the northern section is composed of houses of rare excellence. The fine proportions, the appropriate material, the handsome doorways of these houses, and the graceful iron lamp-brackets in front of them (Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6), all proclaim the influence of a great master in a good period. The doorways of Nos. 4 and 5 are, indeed, with every probability, attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, whose genius was largely employed in the re-building of the Temple. For the Fire of London reached the Temple two days after it broke out, and almost completely destroyed all the buildings east of the Church, King’s Bench Walk included. The houses then were quickly rebuilt, but, as an inscription on a tablet on No. 4 records, only to be burnt down again in 1677. No. 4 was rebuilt in 1678, No. 5 in 1684.

In No. 1, James Scarlett, Lord Abinger, had chambers; at No. 5, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, of whom Colley Cibber, parodying the lines of Pope, wrote:

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