LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO THE INNS OF COURT AND CHANCERT BY W. J. LOFTIE B.A., F.S.A. Author of " WESTMINSTER ABBEY," "WINDSOR CASTLE,' &c. &c. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS BY HERBERT RAILTON New Edition LONDON SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED ESSEX STREET, STRAND 1895 CONTENTS PAGE I. THE SITE . . i The Ward of Farringdon Without The First Settle- ment of the Templars Some Geographical Notes The Opening of Ludgate The Three Temples The Bishop of Exeter in the Outer Temple Lincoln and his Inn Portpool The Inns of Chancery The Greys of Wilton The Murder of the Bishop of Exeter The Earl of Essex The Elector Palatine Barbon and Essex Street The Temple Church Vandalism The Suppression of the Templars The Hospitallers and the Temple The Lawyers Chancery Lane The Bishop of Chichester Gray's Inn Summary. II. THE CHAPELS 31 The Chapels The Templars Their Round Churches Restorations The Temple Church as it is now Dimensions Vaulted Chambers The Monuments Hooker as Master The Effigies in the Round Church Were the Templars Assassins ? The Chamber of Secret Mystery Geoffrey Mandeville William, Earl Marshal Lord Ros The Bodies Discovered Monuments in theTriforium VI Horace Parodied The Master's Office Weale's Opinion of the Restorations The Chapel of Lincoln's Inn The Chapel of Gray's Inn The Chapel of the Rolls The Dean of York. III. THE INNER TEMPLE . . . .69 The oldest Hall The Arms Origin of the Pegasus Plan of the old Temple The Lord Prior of St. John A Manciple The Serjeants The Second Hall Population of the Inner Temple The Buildings The New Hall The Library. IV. THE INNER TEMPLE (continued] . 89 Eminent Inhabitants Charles Lamb a Native of the Temple Thackeray Cowper Shirley Bos- well Johnson Officials of an Inn of Court Old Usages Eating Dinners The Menu Pass the Bottle Laundresses Ladies in the Temple. V. THE INNER TEMPLE (concluded] . 106 Eminent Benchers The "Black Finches" A Royal Bencher Old Names Thurlow Tenterden Lamb's Benchers Hon. Daines Barrington Baron Maseres Ellenborough Jekyll and Sydney Smith Thesiger Inner Temple Hall Paper Buildings King's Bench Walks The Dials The Blackamoor The Last Revels What is an Utter Barrister ? VI. THE MIDDLE TEMPLE . . .127 Beauty of the Two Temples The Literary Associa- tions of the Middle Temple The Fire of 1679 The Gate Brick Court Oliver Goldsmith His Funeral His Grave The Fountain Described by Dickens Lines by " L. E. L." Contents vii VII. THE MIDDLE TEMPLE (concluded} . 146 The Hall Manningham's Diary Shakespeare's Twelfth Night The Revels The Moots The Masques The Rival Roses Edmund Burke- The Library The Garden The Dials Great Lawyers The Norths Jeffreys Blackstone Eldon. VIII. LINCOLN'S INN . . . . .173 Vandalism at Lincoln's Inn The Old Gate The Old Hall Thurloe New Square Stone Building The Drill Hall" The Devil's Own "The New Hall The Arms The New Library Scott's Work The Old Library Picturesque Aspect of Lincoln's Inn. IX. LINCOLN'S INN (concluded} . .198 The Great Men SirThomasMore William Rastell John Donne Egerton Cromwell Lambarde Prynne Hale Murray, Bathurst, and Brougham Miss Brougham's Grave and Monument The Preachers Bishop Heber. X. GRAY'S INN ..... 226 Origin A Faulty Theory Dugdale's Account The Chapel The Ground Plan Opening to Holborn The Hall Attacks of " Restoration " Chaplains and Preachers The Arms The Masque of Flowers Eminent Members The Cecils The Bacons The Gardens. viii The Inns of Coitrt PAGE XI. THE INNS OF CHANCERY. . .251 The Inns of Chancery are abolished Their Number Other Inns Our Lady's Inn Stow's Account Furnival's Inn Clifford's Inn and the Inner Temple The Dinner and Grace The Hall A Curious Region Serjeants' Inn The Rolls The Record Office A walk from Fleet Street to Chancery Lane. XII. THE INNS OF CHANCERY (concluded*) . 276 Clement's Inn New Inn Lyon's Inn Cursitor Street Staple Inn Dr. Johnson Barnard's Inn -Survey of the whole Subject Its Architectural Features Its Associations. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE TEMPLE CHURCH. BY H. RAILTON . . Frontispiece PAGE MIDDLE TEMPLE GATEWAY FROM THE STRAND. BY H. RAILTON . ........ n TEMPLE CHURCH. BY H. RAILTON . . . . 21 A KNIGHT TEMPLAR WILLIAM MARESCHAL, EARL OF PEMBROKE. BY H. RAILTON ..... 27 INTERIOR OF TEMPLE CHURCH. BY H. RAILTON . . 35 INTERIOR OF TEMPLE CHURCH. BY H. RAILTON . . 39 TURRET STAIRWAY TO TRIFORIUM. BY H. RAILTON . 43 THE MASTER'S HOUSE FROM THE INNER TEMPLE. . BY H. RAILTON 59 TOMB OF DEAN YOUNG IN THE CHAPEL OF THE ROLLS 65 THE CLOISTERS. BY H. RAILTON 73 OLD DOORWAY, LAMB COURT. BY H. RAILTON . . 77 ORIEL IN THE HALL. BY H. RAILTON 81 THE INNER TEMPLE LIBRARY. BY H. RAILTON . . 85 CUT-BRICK PORTAL IN KING'S BENCH WALK. BY H. RAILTON 87 CORNER IN HARE COURT. BY H. RAILTON ... 93 GOLDSMITH'S GRAVE. BY H. RAILTON .... 96 The Inns of Court PAGE MIDDLE TEMPLE LANE. BY H. RAILTON . . . 113 MIDDLE TEMPLE HALL AND FOUNTAIN COURT. BY H. RAILTON 129 THE FOUNTAIN IN THE TEMPLE. FROM AN ENGRAVING BY FLETCHER AFTER NICHOLS, 1710. . . . 133 BRICK COURT. BY H. RAILTON 137 A BIT FROM ESSEX COURT. BY H. RAILTON. . . 141 MIDDLE TEMPLE HALL. BY H. RAILTON . . . 147 PORTION OF SCREEN IN MIDDLE TEMPLE HALL. BY H. RAILTON . . . . . . . . .151 GATEWAY OF MIDDLE TEMPLE. BY H. RAILTON . . 157 BRIDGE AND PORCH OF MIDDLE TEMPLE LIBRARY. BY H. RAILTON 163 MIDDLE TEMPLE LIBRARY. BY H. RAILTON . . .167 THE GATE-HOUSE, LINCOLN'S INN, CHANCERY LANE. BY A. E. PEARCE 174 THE CHAPEL AND THE OLD HALL, LINCOLN'S INN. BY A. E. PEARCE . . . . . . . .175 SCREEN IN THE OLD HALL, LINCOLN'S INN. BY A. E. PEARCE . . . . . . . . .179 NEW HALL AND LIBRARY, FROM NEW SQUARE. BY A. E. PEARCE 183 ORIEL WINDOW IN HALL. BY H. RAILTON . . .187 INTERIOR OF LINCOLN'S INN HALL. BY A. E. PEARCE . 191 PEWS IN THE CHAPEL. BY A. E. PEARCE . . 193 ENTRANCE PORCH. BY H. RAILTON .... 195 CHAMBERS IN OLD SQUARE. BY A. E. PEARCE . . 201 LINCOLN'S INN FROM CAREY STREET. BY H. RAILTON . 205 ARCHES OF CRYPT. BY H. RAILTON .... 209 NEW SQUARE, LINCOLN'S INN. BY A. E. PEARCE . 212 AREA IN NEW SQUARE. BY A. E. PEARCE . . . 213 List of Illustrations PAGE LINCOLN'S INN LIBRARY AND HALL. BY H. RAILTON . 217 SEARLE'S GATE, LINCOLN'S INN. BY A. E. PEARCE . 219 GATEWAY OF LINCOLN'S INN. BY H. RAILTON . . 221 FIELD COURT. BY H. RAILTON 229 GRAY'S INN. BY H. RAILTON 235 SOUTH SQUARE, GRAY'S INN. BY H. RAILTON . . 239 WROUGHT IRON GATES, GRAY'S INN. BY H. RAILTON . 245 NEW INN. BY H. RAILTON 255 OLD FURNIVAL'S INN, HOLBORN. FROM WILKINSON'S LONDON 259 COURT OF OLD FURNIVAL'S INN. FROM WILKINSON'S LONDON 263 CORNER IN CLIFFORD'S INN. BY H. RAILTON . . 267 CLIFFORD'S INN. BY H. RAILTON 271 STAPLE INN. BY H. RAILTON 277 STAPLE INN FROM SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS. BY H. RAILTON 281 A PEEP FROM THE GARDEN, STAPLE INN. BY H. RAILTON 285 GATEWAY OF STAPLE INN. BY H. RAILTON . . . 289 COURTYARD, BARNARD'S INN. BY H. RAILTON . . 295 THE INNS OF COURT THE SITE The Ward of Farringdon Without The First Settlement of the Templars Some Geographical Notes The Opening of Lud- gate The Three Temples The Bishop of Exeter in the Outer Temple Lincoln and his Inn Portpool The Inns of Chancery The Greys of Wilton The Murder of the Bishop of Exeter The Earl of Essex The Elector Palatine Barbon and Essex Street The Temple Church Vandalism The Suppression .of the Templars The Hospitallers and the Temple The Lawyers Chancery Lane The Bishop of Chichester Gray's Inn Summary. T is a curious fact that all the Inns of Court and Chancery are within the boundaries of the city of London, or within a stone's throw of the bound- aries. They are, in fact, all either within, or just beyond, the borders of one city ward, that of Farringdon Without. B 2 The Inns of Court There must be a reason for this, and it is the business of the historian to find out what that reason is. We must first get hold of a date to start from, a chronological " from which," and then work down the stream of time as steadily as we can. We know that Farringdon Without was made a city ward in or before 1223, but long before that time Fleet Street had been reckoned a suburb, and was under civic rule and governance. It is referred to as early as 1115, under the designation of " Ultra Fletam," and the names of four tenants there of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's and the occupation of one, a lorimer, or maker of bits and stirrups are mentioned. The great man of the region was named Theobald, and Theobald had a daughter who married Fulcred, and Theobald gave her a piece of land as a marriage portion. But Fulcred was dead, and his son William succeeded to the land. I cannot date the document exactly in which these names occur, but it must have been written, as I have said, in or before 1115. Three years later a great event happened in the region " Ultra Fletam," an event which has continued to mark its history ever since : the Knights Templars settled in Holborn in 1 1 1 8. It may be well to make some geographical notes before proceeding farther. We remember that the Thames was then, and long after, the The Site 3 great highway between the city of London and the King's court and the royal abbey at West- minster. But there was also a street or road which led from the city to the palace. It was not, however, as we might suppose at first sight, the street which we know now as Fleet Street, with its continuation, the Strand. In many books you will find it stated that this roadway is very ancient ; that it was first made by the Romans, and that it entered the city at Ludgate. But no such roadway could have existed there was no Roman gate at Ludgate. In stating this, I am met by a single fact, which, in the minds of people not thoroughly acquainted with the geography of the district, might be taken as conclusive. There is an undoubtedly Roman building, or part of one, in a lane leading southward from the Strand. But if you start from the Roman bath and go northward, you ascend a steep slope to reach the roadway, and you perceive that a little way off, upon your right, there is a slope downward down Fleet Street ; and a little way farther, on your left, there is another, but slighter, slope down the Strand. You perceive, in fact, that you are on a ridge, and, if you pursue it, you will be led to High Holborn, and will perceive there also a decided slope to the right, and a slighter one to the left The Roman bath, thus used, teaches us, not that there was a gate at 4 The Inns of Court Ludgate, and a road leading westward from it, but that the Romans coming out of the city by their gate near where Newgate is now, crossing the Fleet by their bridge in the hollow, and ascending Hoi- born Hill, made their way down the ridge I have mentioned to a place where it jutted into the Thames. There they built their bath, and there, no doubt, they took boating for Westminster, if they desired to go so far, for a pavement has been discovered to show that the Romans built at Westminster as well as in the Strand. The first settlement, then, " Ultra Fletam," after the Conquest, in all probability was in High Hoi born, and neither Fleet Street nor the street of the Strand could exist until the opening of Ludgate, whose name is good Anglo-Saxon for a postern, and has no more to do with King Lud than it has with the Luddites ; and until a bridge had been made at what we call Ludgate Circus, over the lower, wide, tidal reach of the Fleet ; and until enough dry ground had been made by deepening the Thames and em- banking, to give room, first, for houses on the west side of the Fleet about Bridewell before the ridge was climbed, and, secondly, for draining and rendering habitable the land between Fleet Street and the river. These conditions did not exist in Roman times. They did not exist when the boundary between the city of London and the The Site 5 manor of the Abbot of Westminster was called London Fen (see Westminster Abbey, ii. 34), in the middle of the tenth century, a little more than a century before the Conquest. They did not exist when, before the year 1115, the four tenants of St. Paul's lived beyond the Fleet ; and they did not exist when the Knights Templars began to build in 1 1 1 8 in High Holborn. But when seventy years or so had elapsed, these conditions did exist. Ludgate had been opened ; the road had been carried, presumably by a bridge, across the lower Fleet ; the city had begun to claim land which the Abbot said was his ; much engineering work had been carried out ; and, finally, the Templars wanting more room than they could get in Holborn, with new houses rising all round in Fetter Lane, in Show-well Lane (which we call Shoe Lane), in Chancery Lane obtained the fine open meadow sloping down to the Thames on the southern side of the new street, and there built a great house and the church, part of which is still standing. They also rented a field on the other side of the new road along the Strand. It was called Fickett's Field, and squared with the Outer Temple, or that part of their own domain which was not within the city boundaries. This field was used for tilting, and doubtless ' The Forge,' for which the city still pays a rent to the Crown, was the place where the armour 6 The Inns of Court of the Templars was fitted and riveted, and their horses shod. We now leave geography and return to history. We find the Templars settled on the extreme verge of the city territory, but inside the boundary. A brief examination of a plan of the ward shows a kind of semi-circular projection just at Temple Bar, extending a few yards to the west, and marking, no doubt, where there was at some remote period a semi-circular outwork to protect the city entrance. North of this point the boundary runs so as almost to surround the holding of the Bishop of Chichester, and then slopes away eastward, reaching Holborn at Staple Inn. The Ward of Farringdon was not yet so called, but was the Ward of Holborn and Fleet Street, and in 1222 the city hold on it was tightened by the Mayor and the Abbot coming to an arrangement by which the city was to retain the land, but the abbey was to have the two new churches of St. Bride and St. Dunstan. Henry III. soon took St. Dunstan's from the Abbot, but to this day St. Bride's is in the gift of the Abbot's successors, the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. A few years later, the boundaries of the ward were settled. An arbitrary division was probably made then, a division which still exists. We all know there was, and is, an Inner Temple. This was probably the ground on which the domestic The Site 7 buildings stood, the nearest part to the city, and abutting on the precincts of the Carmelites or White Friars, who had settled eastward of the Templars in 1241. The Templars, in addition to these buildings which ended on the west with the church, had probably gardens or orchards beyond and a gateway into Fleet Street, and this is now the Middle Temple. But the word " Middle " implies the existence of at least three entities, so to speak. There was an Inner Temple, and the adjoining space was not the Outer, but the Middle Temple. We know two further things about the ground. The city boundary, more or less fortified, ran outside that is, to west- ward of the Middle Temple and cut off a field which the Templars possessed. This was the Outer Temple, and sloped gently to a certain stream which here crossed the Strand, and, before it fell into the Thames, worked a mill. The roadway ran through the brook by a ford, commemorated by Milford Lane, and the Templars had a bridge, or what we should call a floating wharf, where, until the making of the Thames Embankment, there were stairs and a landing or embarking place. The Outer Temple never belonged to the lawyers, but was leased to Walter Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, by whose tenancy hangs a tragic tale, to be told presently. Finally, it belonged to the Devereuxes, Earls of Essex, and so we have, 8 The Inns of Court marking its site, Devereux Court and Essex Street, where this chapter on its history is now being published. Soon after the Templars and the Carmelites had established themselves south of Fleet Street, Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, and the Bishop of Chichester settled themselves on territory which lay over against the Temple, on the north side of the new street, and just outside the extreme verge of the city defences. Beyond it, as beyond the Temple, there lay a paddock, and beyond that again the open common still known, though no longer open nor common, as Lincoln's Inn Fields. This estate takes us up to Holborn, and across the way, but also outside the city boundary, is Gray's Inn, a much later addition. At the time of which I am writing, the thirteenth century to wit, if there was a house here it must have been the manor house of a canon of St. Paul's. But it is more likely that the incumbent of the prebend of Portpool, his estate being so near the city, preferred to have his house within the protection of the city wall, or at least within the boundary. There is, therefore, some difficulty about the manor of Portpool, and I remember, some years ago, that my lamented friend, Mr. Benjamin Webb, when he told me he had been presented to the prebend of Portpool, asked if I could tell him where Portpool was. But the " port," which means, in this connection, The Site 9 rather an extra-mural market than a gate, may be found, perhaps, in the neighbouring Staple Inn, which is not " Staple's Inn," as it is sometimes erroneously called, but a name which denotes, by another old word, the existence of a market ; and the pool well, what can be more natural than that a horse-pond adjoined the market-place? However, the market-place has become an Inn of Chancery, and the horse-pond the site of an Inn of Court. These, then, are the four Inns of Court, namely, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, and Gray's Inn. The Inns of Chancery were subject in certain matters to the Inns of Court ; but by degrees all have been dissolved and are Inns of Chancery no longer. They were, under the Inner Temple, Clifford's, Clement's, and Lyon's ; under the Middle Temple, Strand and New ; under Lin- coln's Inn, Furnival's and Thavies'; and under Gray's Inn, Staple and Barnard's. Besides the regular Inns of Chancery there were several wholly independent bodies, such as two Serjeants' Inns, and the com- paratively obscure Dane's Inn. In early times we read of other societies of lawyers, which, in their origin at least, might have claimed to be Inns of Chancery, if Dugdale is right in saying they derived this name from being " Hospicia for the clerks of the Chancery." There was also a hospice, known as Scroope's Inn, adjoining the palace of the Bishops io The Inns of Court of Ely in Holborn, and some of small duration seem to have subsisted still farther east, about Smithfield and the Old Bailey. It will have been perceived that all these rookeries of the lawyers are close to the city boundaries except Gray's Inn. The reason for this may be found in the fact that the two Temples and Lincoln's Inn are older than Gray's Inn. When students of the law betook themselves to the monastery of the mili- tary order and to the palace of the last of the Lacies, there was no security except in cities. It was danger- ous as well as inconvenient to be at any distance from the walls. But when, in the year 1516, an associa- tion, consisting of two Serjeants and four barristers, took out a lease at ten shillings rent of the manor of Portpool from the Prior of Shene, public security had been so far ensured by good government that many people considered it perfectly safe to live in houses built all along the Strand as far as Charing Cross, and much farther west than the old manor house of Edmond, Lord Grey de Wilton. In the older days, as we have seen, the lawyers never took to the Outer Temple, but, as has often been observed, the pioneers, the first colonists, so to speak, of the Strand were the bishops, who, perhaps, thought themselves suffi- ciently protected by their sacred office. Accordingly, the Bishop of Exeter ran the risk and built his palace outside the city boundary. The result, though it The Site 13 really had little or nothing to do with the palace in the Outer Temple, was not encouraging. Walter Stapledon was appointed to govern the See of Exeter in 1308. He speedily built himself " a very fair house," afterwards known as Essex House, and in 1320 was Treasurer to Edward II. In the contests between the King and his Queen, whom Gray has commemorated in the title, " She- wolf of France," Bishop Stapledon sided with the King, who, however, leaving his Treasurer to defend London, fled to the west on the news of Isabella's landing. This was in the autumn of 1326. But the London citizens, impoverished by the malad- ministration of the weak Edward, did not care to obey his nominee. The Bishop was mobbed in the streets. He had been peaceably riding to dine at a hostelry in Warwick Lane, then called Old Dean's Lane, and when the tumult broke out he turned his horse in order to take refuge in the adjacent church of St. Paul. But before he reached the sanctuary he was torn from the saddle, and hustled by the crowd through the network of lanes of which Paternoster Row survives, among others until he reached the church of St. Michael-le-Querne, where Peel's statue is now. Here, at the foot of the Cross of Cheap, lay ghastly evidence of the temper of the rioters. Earlier in the day, John Marshall, a citizen who opposed the Queen's party, had been seized in his 14 The Inns of Court house by the Wallbrook, carried into the market- place, and beheaded. Here the unhappy Bishop shared the same fate, and with him two of his adherents, William Walle and a certain John of Paddington, who, as we read in the French Chronicle, "was warden of the manor of the afore- said Bishop, without Temple Bar, and was held in bad repute." The rest of the story more nearly concerns the Outer Temple. " Upon the same day," continues the chronicler, " toward vespers, came the choir of St. Paul's and took the headless body of the said Bishop, and carried it to St. Paul's Church, where they were given to understand that he had died under sentence ; upon which the body was carried to the church of St. Clement, without Temple Bar." The people of the church, however, were afraid to receive it, warned by the attitude of the mob, who had already plundered the Bishop's house, close by. The body of the Bishop and the bodies of his servants were buried in a heap of sand behind the house, all naked as they had been dragged from the city " mes qe une femme luy dona un ancien drapiau pour coverer le ventre." Some time later, the Queen and her son, repenting of the deed done in their name, punished the citizens who could be identified as con- cerned in the murders, and took the body of the Bishop to Exeter, where his effigy still lies on the north side of the choir, under a curiously painted canopy. The Site 15 Nearly three hundred years elapsed, and once more the Outer Temple is concerned with a city riot. Robert Devereux, " Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Essex," here made his plans for raising London against the Queen's government. The measures of Burghley had been too carefully matured, and Essex, discomfited, unable to raise the citizens or to obtain arms from the armourers in Gracechurch Street, turned to make his exit by Ludgate. This the Bishop would by no means permit, and the baffled conspirators, when " Paul's Chain," then a reality, had been lifted to let them pass, descended to Paul's Wharf and took a boat to the landing-place at Essex House. In the evening they were arrested here and taken over to Lambeth. When, in the following reign, the Elector Palatine, or Palsgrave of the Rhine, came to wed the King's daughter, he was lodged in Essex House. A court in the Outer Temple afterwards bore the name of Palsgrave Place. The Parliamentarian general, Essex, was born and also died in Essex House. Finally, Barbon, the brother of " Praise God Bare- bones," bought it, and built Essex Street on the site ; this was in 1680, but a portion of the old house remained until 1777. And so the Outer Temple disappears from the page of history. There are but three specimens of Norman archi- tecture above-ground in London. One of the three is the round part of the Temple Church. True, in 1 6 The Inns of Court addition to the Tower and its chapel of St. John, and to the grand church of the Canons of St. Bartholomew, there is a crypt in Cheap, under the church of St. Mary-le-Bow ; also a crypt exists in the precincts of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell. But we have to go far into the country to find another specimen of Norman, west of the walls of London, and even ordinary Gothic only exists in the Savoy at Lincoln's Inn and Westminster. During the first outbreak of the so-called " great Gothic revival," the fell spirit of " restoration " laid a heavy hand on the sole relic of the Templars. The work carried out in 1845 at this place would alone justify a recent suggestion, namely, that in writing or speaking of modern, or mock, Gothic, as distinguished from the real thing, the term Vandal or Vandalic might be used. The name of Gothic was certainly bestowed by our not very remote ancestors on mediaeval, and especially on pointed architecture, as a term of reproach. When we see how the modern architect has used what he would persuade us is Gothic as Smirke used it at the Temple, as Mr. Pearson has used it at Westminster, as Salvin used it at the Tower, and as Lord Grimthorpe is now using it at St. Albans what name can we think of more appropriate ? Nothing else, as we shall see, will adequately describe the alterations made in the chapel of Inigo Jones in Lincoln's Inn. And The Site 17 certainly, when we compare the Temple Church as it now is with what we can judge it to have been fifty years ago from numerous engravings and descriptions, we cannot but assert that the changes have well deserved the name of Vandalism. The monuments, which comprised many great names, and showed many fine old figures in judicial robes and shields of multitudinous quarterings, have been broken to pieces, or removed to a kind of garret, and the effigies of the knights have been arranged symmetrically in groups. The suppression of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre is among the many obscure passages in the history of Edward II. They first settled in England in i i 1 8, and the narrative of their sojourn here closes in torture and spoliation as early as 1313. They made, considering the short two centuries of their stay, a very indelible impression on our topography and architecture, if not on our history- The Order grew out of one of the numerous con- fraternities to which the Crusades gave birth, and Hugh Payne, or ' de Paganis,' with Godfrey of St. Omer, are named as the founders. Only seven other knights joined at first in their vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and succour of the Holy Land ; but within a year they had- so grown and prospered that they were able to establish a house in London, and built a round church in Holborn, where now C 1 8 The Inns of Court stand Southampton Buildings, and where, a hundred and fifty years ago, the foundations were laid bare. There was a bar at this, the old Temple, as well as at the new ; for when the knights removed to the meadows by .the Thames, they still kept their build- ings within the lines of the city defences, while the other military knights, those of St. John, pre- ferred to be wholly in the country, at the village of Clerkenwell. Some curious documents are extant as to the crimes and confessions of the Templars. Their fall may, however, be attributed to several influential circumstances which worked together against them. They were reputed very wealthy. They had done nothing for many years to redeem their vows of " succouring Jerusalem," or protecting pilgrims. The Hospitallers were envious of them. And, finally, the Pope himself turned against them, and their doom was decreed. In Wilkins's Concilia, some of the confessions are reported, and seem certainly to have been extorted from the weaker members of the Order by fear, if not by actual torture. Leading questions were put to them, especially as to heretical doctrines ; the answers were twisted, and every form of inquisitorial terrorism was employed. One knight in particular, who seems to have been weakly in body, as we read that he could not attain to the highest rank owing to his lameness, showed no courage, The Site 19 and answered " Yes " to any accusation, however absurd. He was Treasurer of the Temple. The Treasury of these devotees of poverty was one of the chief features of the house, and was used by King John and King Henry III. as a safe place of deposit for the regalia on several occasions. Stoke's con- fession won him absolution. But Thomas de la More, grand master in England, with six knights and twenty - two subordinate members of the Order, confessed nothing but the orthodox faith, and made a noble and pathetic appeal to their prejudiced judges. The Templars were sent to the Tower, but many or most of them, having been degraded, were eventually released, and some of them were pensioned. Very different was the treatment they received in France, where they were prosecuted with the utmost severity, and their grand master put to death by a slow fire. The Kings of both France and England, if they had moved against the Templars from motives of cupidity, must have been dis- appointed, for the decree of the Council of Vienna, convoked by Clement V. in 1312, gave their possessions to the rival Knights of St. John, who continued in England to hold them, including the Middle and Inner Temples, till the dissolution of the monastic orders, under Henry VIII. We have more to say about the Templars in the next chapter, as their beautiful church contains most interesting 20 The Inns of Court memorials of some of them. The Hospitallers must have found such a palace as the Templars had built in Fleet Street rather of the nature of a white elephant, and it was long before they were enabled to let it to any advantage. In the meanwhile, it seems to have been occupied, at the King's instance, by Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. Some say he had a grant of it from the King, which seems unlikely. In any case Aymer did not long occupy it, for Edward next gave it to Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, " Saint Thomas," as the people called him, who was murdered, under judicial forms, at Pontefract, in 1322. At his death it was supposed to revert to the Crown, with Fickett's Field, on which the Law Courts stand now, which, as we have seen, had been a place of exercise and perhaps a tilting- ground for the Templars. But in 1324 the decree of the Pope's council was enforced, and the house became absolutely the property of the Knights of St. John, lest, as the decree ran, " the same should be put to profane uses." The new owners interpreted the clause for themselves, and as, no doubt, the majority of lawyers and many of the judges were in orders, they may have thought they were carrying it out to the letter when they leased the house at ten pounds a year to a certain society of students of the law. The date of this transaction must be placed somewhere between 1338 and 1377, but the deeds The Site 23 were lost when the rebels of 1381 destroyed the records of the new Templars. The rebels seem to have acted as the Irish holders of notes issued by an obnoxious bank acted when they put them in the fire and made the banker's fortune ! Certainly, though their deeds perished, the students of the law held their house even until the Dissolution, when the ground passed into the possession of the Crown. Even then, as we shall see, they were not disturbed, and eventually became owners of the freehold. As to whether they are within the city and its jurisdic- tion, opinions differ. There can be no difficulty as to their geographical position. The Inner and Middle Temples are certainly within the boundaries of the Ward of Farringdon Without. When " the students of the law " had obtained settled possession of the Temple, another and similar society had already established themselves at the other side of Fleet Street. The Dominicans, or Black Friars, came into the kingdom in 1215, and had gradually settled themselves on a piece of ground facing into the roadway of Holborn, at the western side of the northern end of what we know as Chancery Lane. Here, according to their custom, they added field to field, and garden to garden, by purchase, exchange, testamentary and eleemosynary gift, and by incessant, tireless begging. At last they amassed a large territory, reaching from 24 The Inns of Court Holborn down to the house and coney garth of the Bishop of Chichester. This " piecea terrae," to quote the elegant Latinity of an old document, did not content them, and, in 1278, they removed to what we know as Blackfriars, a place just within the city wall, where an embankment of the Fleet had left a space vacant at high as well as low tides. Their holding in Holborn came into the market, so to speak, and was bought by Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, in 1286 a man of learning and law, as well as of military prowess, who filled several high judicial offices, and in 1310 was one of the " Lords Ordainers of Reform." He gave the friars 550 marks, to be paid in instalments, "for all their place, buildings, and habitation near Holebourn," to be held by all the accustomed secular services due to the lord of the fief. The grant was read and enrolled in the Hustings of London on the 4th March, and about a year later received royal con- firmation. From these transactions we may gather that there was at that time at least a doubt as to whether it was in the city or not. There are tales in many books as to the wonderful gardens and orchards Lincoln had here, and what a large sum, in 1295, he was able to make in the market by the sale of his fruit. Mr. Wheatley assesses it at "135 in our currency." Another tale is that Lincoln was so fond of law The Site 25 and lawyers that he had his house full of students, and had already arranged for them to take it over entirely when he died, early in 1311. The particulars of this transfer seem never to have been ascertained. Herbert, who is a fair authority, says tradition reports that Henry Lacy, the great Earl of Lincoln, who, in the next age, had a grant by patent from King Edward I. of " the old friar house juxta Holborn, being a person well affected to the study of the laws," assigned the professors of them this residence, but we are not told whether by gift or purchase. Dugdale mentions this tradition as being current "among the antients here," and adds, "direct proof thereof, from good authority, I have not as yet seen any." The modern boundaries of Lincoln's Inn include " a house in a garden," near the foot of Chancery Lane, which belonged to the Bishops of Chichester, one of whom, the last who lived here, was Chancellor of England in 1292 and 1307. After him, it is said, Chancellor's Lane, now Chancery Lane, is called. He was allowed, owing to the state of the lane during the wardenship of John le Breton, to put up bars to prevent the passage of heavy traffic. These bars were removed as soon as the lawyers obtained their hold on the place, but their tenure was still dependent on the pleasure of successive Bishops of Chichester, the leases reserving a residence for the Bishop when he should visit London, and it 26 The Inns of Court was not until 1536 that Bishop Richard Sampson, with the consent of his Dean and Chapter, finally parted with it to a tenant. In addition to the buildings there was an open space called the Coney Garth, and sometimes Cotterell's Garden. The new proprietors, however, William and Eustace Tyliard, were private persons, and it was not until 1580 that the benchers of Lincoln's Inn obtained the freehold for 520. The whole of the buildings and gardens of Lincoln's Inn are without the present boundary of the city, and Gray's Inn, although geographically its longitude is east of that of Lincoln's Inn, is not within Farringdon ward, although it is within the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, part of which only is reckoned in the city. The manor of Portpool was leased to the Greys of Wilton. John, Lord Grey of Wilton, in 1315 gave lands in the manor to the canons of St. Bartholomew that they should keep a chaplain for him, for " his chapel of Portpole, without the bar of the Old Temple." He died in 1323. Edmund, ninth lord, succeeded about I 505, and soon after, "by indenture of bargain and sale, passed to Hugh Denys, Esquire, his heirs and assigns, the manor of Portpoole, otherwise called Gray's Inn, four messuages, four gardens, the site of a windmill, eight acres of land, ten shillings of free rent, and the advowson of the chantry of Portpoole aforesaid." The Site 29 Some eight years later, the prior and convent of Shene, that is Richmond, in Surrey, bought the manor from Denys' trustees, and let the place to certain " students of the law," for 6 : I 3 : 4 a year. It came to the Crown at the Dissolution, but Henry VIII. renewed the lease, and the Inn has long ago bought the freehold. We have thus traced, in places somewhat uncertainly, the history of the lands on which the four great Inns of Court were destined to rise. We have seen that at first men crowded into the city for mutual protection, and that those who, like the Bishop of Exeter, lived without the defences, did so at the risk of having their houses plundered. We have further seen that in more settled times a great noble like Grey was not afraid to build his house outside the boundaries, and that by the time of Henry VII. even the unwarlike students of the law could live there securely. That the lawyers should have selected this particular region for their special settlements, that they should have preferred it to the neighbourhood of the King's courts at Westminster, and by what means their institution of Inns was originated and grew up, it is difficult to say. We only know that all conformed more or less exactly to the same model, and it was neither that of a monastery nor yet of a college at a university. In the succeeding chapters I propose to seek out and record whatever 30 The Inns of Court may be found entertaining in the further history of each Inn, but not to neglect the small Inns of Chancery and those inhabited by the Serjeants. To these, also, I must add something about that singular institution known as the Rolls, but formerly a refuge for converted Jews ; and it may be well, also, to give some notes on the King's courts at Westminster, the city courts at Guildhall and their transfer to a new building, partly situated on Fickett's Field, the Templars' old tilting-ground, and partly within the boundaries of the city at " the bar of the New Temple." II THE CHAPELS The Chapels The Templars Their Round Churches Restorations The Temple Church as it is now Dimensions Vaulted Chambers The Monuments Hooker as Master The Effigies in the Round Church Were the Templars Assassins ? The Chamber of Secret Mystery Geoffrey Mandeville William, Earl Marshal Lord Ros The Bodies Discovered Monuments in the Triforium Horace Parodied The Master's Office Weale's Opinion of the Restora- tions The Chapel of Lincoln's Inn The Chapel of Gray's Inn The Chapel of the Rolls The Dean of York. THE Inns of Court have chapels that is to say, there are three for four Inns. The Inner and Middle Temples equitably divide the church of St. Mary between them, and the visitor will see the prayer-books on one side marked with the Pegasus, and on the other with the Paschal Lamb. At Lincoln's Inn the chapel was pronounced too small, and a bay was added to it some years ago. At Gray's Inn the chapel is of great antiquity, but has no features of the slightest interest, unless we 32 The Inns of Court except some of the darkest and ugliest stained glass in London. The Rolls Chapel is only interesting for the monuments it contains and for its curious history. There are no chapels attached to the Inns of Chancery. One of the numerous bands of Crusaders who, in the eleventh century, set forth to wrest Jerusalem from the infidel, was founded by Hugh de Payens and Godfrey de St. Omer. They bound themselves and those who joined them to a vow of poverty so severe that it was said they could afford but one horse for two knights, and they enrolled themselves under the name of " The Soldiers of Christ " (Milites Christi}, or " The Poor Fellow-soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon " (Pauperes Commilitiones Christi et Templi Solomonis], In order to keep up a supply of recruits, they opened agencies in all the countries of Europe, everywhere rivalling in zeal the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, called the Hospitallers, whose Order was founded about the same time. Their first house in London was in Holborn, for reasons set forth in the last chapter, and they speedily became wealthy enough to acquire a better site by the river's side. In fact, the vow of poverty resolved itself into one of community of goods, but there were many ranks and degrees among them. It is to be hoped the other vows of chastity, obedience, and succour to The Chapels 33 pilgrims were better kept ; but to guard the rapidly increasing treasure there seems little doubt that they made their building, or some part of it, so strong that even the king's treasure could be kept safely in it. Of this building nought remains, but the round part of the church comes nearest to it in date. They had assumed the definite name of Knights of the Temple, or Templars, in I I 1 8, when King Baldwin gave them a house close to the traditional site of the Temple in Jerusalem. This site had been long, and is still, covered by a circular building, no doubt of Byzantine origin. We know it as the Mosque of Omar. The knights in England built a round church wherever their colony amounted to the size of a preceptory, sometimes called a commandery. Four of these round churches remain in England, but are not all to 'be attributed to the Templars. One of them is at Little Maplestead, in Essex, and another at Northampton ; but the best known, next to the Temple in London, is the church of St. Sepulchre's in Cambridge, the oldest of all. There are, however, no records to connect either it or Maplestead with the Templars, but it was built, like St. Sepulchre's in London, during the enthusiasm of the Crusade, and was attached from the first to the Benedictine priory of St. Andrew at Barnwell. D 34 The Inns of Court The London church was completed in its first form in 1185, and dedicated to St. Mary by Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who happened to be in London on a begging tour. On a stone engraved in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and said, on the testimony of Stow, to be an accurate copy of an older stone, this event is mentioned, and an indulgence of sixty days promised to annual visitors the earliest example of the kind known, says Pegge. The architecture has been so much altered, patched and restored, and so little that is really old has been left, that we cannot date the Round Church with any degree of certainty. Some of the ornate semicircular arches may have belonged to a building erected towards the end of the twelfth century. If so it must have been nearly rebuilt a few years later, and the rectangular addition made before 1240. The beautiful arcade, with the grotesque heads in the spandrels, only dates from the restoration of 1827. Three years earlier some ancient chambers on the south side, supposed to be remnants of a chapel of St. Anne, were pulled down. What the Temple Church has undergone in " restorations " may be guessed from the following notes. In 1666 it hardly escaped the Great Fire, which approached it as near as the Master's house. In 1685 it was repaired and ornamented, ^/ie Chapels 37 and a handsome Corinthian screen or reredos was set up at the east end. In 1695 a fire destroyed some part of the south-western side, and the stone with the inscription of Heraclius was lost either then or at the subsequent " restoration." In 1736 the north side and east end were repaired. It had comparative rest until 1 8 1 I , when there was a "general reparation." In 1824 a further attack was made upon the unfortunate edifice, and the round part was almost rebuilt, the old carvings being all destroyed. Finally, the greatest Vandal- ism of all took place in ten years from 1830 to 1 840. This disastrous performance, one of the first efforts of the so-called great Gothic revival, consisted in raising and vaulting in painted plaster the central part of the circular church ; in sweeping out all the old marble columns and replacing them throughout by new ones, for which purpose the old Purbeck quarries were reopened ; removing all the old wainscot and the beautiful reredos, and replacing them with tiers of pews, rising at the sides so as to hide the piscina, and the old effigy in the south aisle, and with a Gothic reredos of the poorest design ; painting the roof with shields and mottoes in a supposed thirteenth-century style ; darkening the windows, which already from their narrow shape let in too little light, with stained glass, of which we can only say it is a little better than 38 The Inns of Court what would probably be put in at the present day, our glass-stainers having gone steadily backwards since the time of Willement ; and, finally, gutting out all the beautiful and precious monuments, with their quaint figures and gorgeous heraldry. This Vandalism, every step of which is calculated to take one's breath away, was carried out at enormous expense, its projectors and perpetrators being very much in earnest. It is said that, first and last, the "restoration " cost above 50,000, and any one who remembers that forty years ago few stone-carvers existed, mouldings were unstudied, the principles of the old Gothic were imperfectly under- stood, and all the so-called " mediaeval arts," in wood, stone, marble, glass, and brass, were wholly unknown to a builder's workmen, will not be surprised at the sum. The church, as we now see it, was built, as I have said, about half a century ago, and follows in many particulars the outlines of an ancient church which stood on the same spot. We enter under what looks like a Norman porch, with carving almost all evidently modern, of a late and tran- sitional style ; so Romanesque, indeed, that it resembles the more florid ornamentation of an Italian building of the eighteenth century. Whether the old carving had this character, or \vhether it was imparted to the new by the ignorance of the The Chapels 41 modern carver, I cannot undertake to say. A wide, low arch admits us to the Round Church, where the Norman look of the exterior is ex- changed for a first pointed or Early English effect, very light and pleasant to the eye, though staringly new. The Norman features recede into the upper part of the round building, where they consist of an interlacing arcade of round arches and of the windows. The lower windows are also round- headed, but are very small, and stand in pointed arches, and the transitional character of the building leads up well to the but slightly later design of the eastern part of the church. We can understand that the round part of the original building was finished for the celebration of Divine service, and the eastern proceeded with when the pointed style had prevailed finally over the Norman. It is possible, also, that the vaulting of the Round Church, so far as any of it is ancient, was not made until the eastern chapel was finished. A theory like this will account for everything that might be puzzling in the design. That the two were designed for each other and belonged to each other cannot reasonably be doubted, and, much as I dislike " restoration," I think the removal of the screen which separated the two parts of the church an unquestionable improvement. The design of the eastern building is peculiar, 42 but exceedingly fine. It consists of three aisles of the same length and the same height, but the centre about a third wider than the side aisles. The exact dimensions are as follows : The round, 60 feet 6 inches in diameter ; the oblong, 85 feet i I inches long, and 59 feet -5 inches wide. The round is 59 feet high; the oblong, 37 feet; the aisles a few inches less. The total length from the door is 148 feet, and the porch is 2 I feet wide. That there can have been no projecting east end, or chancel, is proved by the fact that an aumbry or reliquary was found in the east wall when the Corinthian reredos made way for the present unmeaning altar-piece. The side aisles are lighted with lancet triplets to the number of five. Similar triplets are at the east end of the aisles, while the central nave has also a triplet, but considerably wider. The roof, of very light materials, is vaulted, and is supported on Purbeck columns of great elegance and delicacy, consisting of four shafts round a centre, with the usual moulded Early English capital. There is no carved foliage in these capitals, which are evidently imitated from a series of the earliest type. The seats on either side are of dark oak, arranged in tiers rising from the floor. Although not open, they can hardly be described as pews. Two modern doorways are on the north side, as well as the organ. The north- western side pier of the oblong part contains a 45 winding staircase, which ascends in a turret to the triforium of the round part. About half-way up this stair is a small vaulted chamber. The corresponding pier on the south side had also a door in it, which led to two vaulted chambers, probably of later date. They were destroyed in 1823. Among the principal Vandalisms of the" restorers " was the removal of one of the most interesting series of monuments in England. Beginning in the thirteenth century, it came down without a break to the nineteenth. The restorer ruled a line at the fourteenth century. Those monuments which were later were removed to the triforium already mentioned, or were broken up as valueless. A few were placed under the bellows of the organ, but were removed a few years ago, and, I presume, may be identified with some fragments now lying, not set up, in the same garret-like receptacle. The older monuments were then disposed in a tasteful pattern in four groups in the round part of the church, with the exception of the figure of a bishop, which is in a niche in the wall to the south of the altar, but is invisible from the church on account of the theatrical arrangement of the seats. One other exception was made. In the south aisle, at the west end, is a bust of Hooker, " the judicious Hooker," who was Master of the Temple from 1585 to 1595, when he was made Rector of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury. 46 The Inns of Court The incumbency of Hooker is one of the most interesting episodes in the history of the Temple Church. Opinions at that time were much divided as to ecclesiastical affairs. The old English Church, so far, at least, as it was connected with Rome, had been abolished ; the new English Church was still in its infancy. There was a strong Puritan majority in London, who would have purged the Establishment as it was purged soon afterwards in Scotland, and who would have sent Prelacy after Popery. The opposite party had all the learning, but were the weakest in numbers. Between the two was Hooker, not by any means as a trimmer, but as one who held passionately to moderate views. The Master preached his moderate views in the morning. The Reader answered them, or thought he did, in the evening ; and it chanced that the Master and his assistant were not only connected by ties of office, but by matrimonial ties as well. They did not quarrel. There were no personalities. Travers did his best to answer Hooker ; but, in spite of the evident favour of full half the benchers and bar, he failed ; and his efforts are chiefly remembered now because they led Hooker to publish his noble essays on " Ecclesiastical Polity," a book worthy of the age which produced also Shakespeare and Bacon. Nearly a century later, there lived, over the way from the Middle Temple Gate, at the corner of The Chapels 47 Chancery Lane, a man who kept a shop for the sale of hosiery and such-like goods. The house must have stood, so greatly has the thoroughfare been widened, nearly in what is now the middle of the street. When he had made a competence he retired. He had married a wife who came of a family of bishops, like the Sumners and Wilberforces in England, and the Elliots and Potters in America, in our own day ; and whether because he liked clergy- men though he liked better fishing with an angle Izaak Walton amused his leisure by writing about the sweet George Herbert, the good Bishop Sanderson, the judicious Mr. Richard Hooker, and other eminent divines ; and not until a later and greater biographer wrote about a later and greater Templar not until Boswell wrote Jolmson were his delightful bio- graphies surpassed or superseded in interest. This is a digression, the less excusable because the little bust of Hooker is as nothing in comparison with the long series of supposed Knights Templars laid out for inspection in the Round Church, and the monuments of the great Cokes and Littletons, who are supposed to have created the British Constitution in the triforium. The recumbent effigies were the subjects of much futile guessing at the time of the great " restoration," fifty years ago. The mystery which has always enshrouded, and probably will now for ever enshroud, 48 The Inns of Court the Templars, covered these figures too, and they became, with the whole church, the prey of the guessers and theorists who, in our day, have turned their chief attention to one of the Egyptian pyramids. There is a most diverting treatise by a Mr. Clarkson, " whose well-known familiarity with the subject of Egyptian masonry, and all the associations with which it is connected, does not call for any comment on my part." So says Billings in the preface to his book on the Temple Church. Clarkson's treatise is intended to answer the question, " Were the Templars gnostic idolaters, as alleged ? " The answer he expects to find in the " symbolic evidences of the Temple Church." I have not heard elsewhere of the " symbolic evidences " of the Temple or any other church. The Templars, it seems, had been identified by Von Hammer with the Assassins, and Clarkson thinks his arguments inconclusive. That they may have been accused of such a connection is not unlikely. Having, as he says, cleared the way, he proceeds gravely to show a close association between the Temple Church, the Temple at Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, the Mosaic Ark, and, of course, the Pyramids. This astonishing feat is performed by that universal solvent in such problems, Free- masonry. The " close affinity of masonic forms and ideal associations " I confess I do not understand the sentence has been fully proved, he tells *us, by The Chapels 49 the Irish Round Towers, by Stonehenge, and by the Mexican city of Palenque. It would be wearisome to go much farther. The reader will exclaim that a man who can see " the ideal association " of the Ark of Moses and Mexico can see anything. That was fifty years ago : but not five years ago I came on a new book, written, printed, and published to show that the hieroglyphics on Cleopatra's Needle relate to King David, and contain texts from the Psalms ; so we are not, in the aggregate, so very much wiser than they of two generations ago. Mr. Clarkson finds that there are seven inter-columniations in the Round Church. When one of these people reaches anything containing this magical number, we know but too well what he can do with it. There is much about the staircase on the north side and the " little chamber of secret mystery," and other thrilling subjects, and the whole result is, that the reader, who may hitherto have looked upon Billings as a cautious and accurate architectural antiquary, finds him sadly wanting in judgment for admitting such stuff. Who can blame the people of the fourteenth century if they believed the seventy-three Templars in France who confessed, under shocking tortures, that they worshipped the idol Bahumeth ? Mr. Clarkson, the Egyptologist, identifies Bahumeth with Behemoth, and both with Apis ! After this, we may go on to the monuments. It would not have been E 50 The Inns of Court right to pass wholly by Clarkson and his mystery, because it partly helps to account for a certain curious, almost superstitious, interest which any one who remembers London fifty years ago will recognise as having existed about the Temple Church. A similar fascination cannot be said to be wholly ex- tinct as to the Great Pyramid. Both have their value in that colossal work, the " history of human error," which Mr. Caxton has not yet published. So we may, I think, contemplate these strange effigies without any misgivings or fears that the men they represent were Assassins, or Bahumethians, or even Freemasons. They are ten in number, not counting the Bishop's coffin at the east end. A very careful account of them all was written and published in 1845 by Edward Richardson, a sculptor. The Bishop's coffin was opened in 1810, and again in 1841. The remains are supposed to be those of Sylvester Everden, Bishop of Carlisle, who was killed by a fall from his horse in 1254. A coffin was found under the effigy, and within it a human skeleton wrapped in sheet lead. The skull was perfect, but the bones were scattered and disordered, and it is supposed that the tomb had been violated by the rioters of 1381. Strange to say, part of the skeleton of a baby was in the same coffin, probably a son of Henry III., who died in 1256. The Chapels 51 Of the effigies in the Round Church, some bear shields with arms on them, and so can be identified. People acquainted with London history may re- member that one of the prominent causes of the failure of the Empress Matilda to seat herself firmly on the throne afterwards occupied by her son, the great Henry II., was her conduct in respect of Geoffrey Mandeville, whom King Stephen had made Earl of Essex. She alienated London from her cause by appointing Geoffrey Constable of the Tower, and placing the city, and with it both Essex and Middlesex, the old heptarchian kingdom of the East Saxons, under his jurisdiction as justice and sheriff. Even the Conqueror had respected the liberties of the city. Matilda threw away her last chance by putting it, in the language of the day, " in ferme." Although Stephen was actually a prisoner at the time, her cause was lost. No person, says the chronicle, could hold pleas either in city or county without permission from the Earl of Essex. This state of things could not last long, and, as soon as Matilda's back was turned, Essex had to surrender the Tower, his dominion was superseded, and he retired to the north on a military expedition, in which he received an arrow-wound, from which he died. The Templars received his body in their house in Holborn, but, it being represented to them that he died excommunicated, they hesitated to bury 52 The Inns of Court it. According to one account, they suspended the coffin to a tree in their garden. When they moved to the Strand they took it with them, and when at last absolution was obtained, it was laid in the Round Church, there to rest until Smirke dug it up. Contemporary writers are very unanimous about Essex. True, the author of the Gesta StepJiani speaks leniently of him on one page, but on the next says he was " savage and turbulent." William of Newburgh says he was " most ferocious." The effigy, which must be one of the oldest in the church, is of Sussex marble. It formerly lay between " the first and second columns immediately on the left of a person entering the Round through the western doorway." Richardson says, " The features are hard, the nose long, the eyes deeply sunk, and the mouth fretful." But we cannot easily believe that this effigy is a portrait any more than its companions. Identi- fication is secured by means of the shield, on which what heralds call an " escarbuncle " is carved. The arms of Mandeville, or " de Magnavilla " family, were "quarterly, or and gules, an escarbuncle, sable," and here it is in bold relief, with " flowery rays extending in all directions to the outside rounded edge of the shield." Beside this effigy is a rudely carved figure in low relief, reputed, from its appearance, to be the oldest in the church. The legs of Essex are crossed, so The Chapels 53 that their posture cannot be taken to denote a Crusader, as some have supposed. In this figure they are straight Another straight-legged effigy rests its feet on two grotesque human heads, presum- ably those of Saracens. In a monument at Lingfield, Lord Cobham rests his feet on a whole turbaned and bearded Saracen. The next effigy, also unidentified, has his legs crossed. Among the figures lies a coffin- lid, without any mark but a slight coping and some carving, which has been taken to represent the heads of a lion and a lamb. On this ground, the stone is supposed to cover the body of a Master of the Temple. On the south side are three figures of the Marshal family. They had for several generations been great fighting folk, and took their name from the hereditary office they held. Their arms were, " Per pale or and vert, a lion rampant gules," and lions are on their shields. They were specially dis- tinguished for exploits against the savage Irish, among whom a predecessor of these three earls is still remembered under the name of " Strongbow," and his broken effigy is shown in the cathedral of Christ Church, in Dublin. Much more authentic are these figures in the Temple Church, and Camden, writing in the reign of James I., speaks of the inscrip- tion on one of them as then still partly visible. This William was Earl of Pembroke, Earl Marshal, Earl of Striguil, Lord of Longueville, of Leinster and of 54 The Inns of Court Orbec. He assumed the cross, as deputy for " King Henry the Younger," the son of Henry II., who was crowned but never reigned. He served with Richard I. in the Holy Land, and, though constantly loyal to the despicable John, he was so highly respected that the Barons accepted his surety for the King's performance of his promise. John was actually living in the house of the Templars at the time, and the Master of the Temple, Amaric, was with the Earl Marshal at Runnymead when the King finally yielded. It is always said that this same earl, when he was guardian to the youthful Henry III., extended the Great Charter to Ireland. He died in May 1219, and was buried on Ascension Day in the Temple Church. Few characters of that age come out so well. Shakespeare makes him plead for Prince Arthur in a well-known passage. He was a great benefactor to the " brethren of the chivalry of the Temple." His eldest son, William, succeeded him, and also lies buried here, as does Gilbert, a younger son, who was also Earl Marshal. The second Earl William died in 1231, and Henry III., whose sister he had married, attended his burial in the Round Church. Earl Gilbert was killed in a tournament at Ware, in June 1242. Both brothers had given lands to the Templars. Two more brothers remained, succeeded to the earldom, and died without children, when their family became The Chapels 55 extinct, in accordance, says Matthew Paris, with a curse pronounced upon the first Earl William by a Bishop of Ferns, in Ireland, whom he had deprived of certain lands. Next to Earl Gilbert lies the effigy of an unknown knight, with his legs crossed. Near him is the figure of Lord Ros, or Roos, of Hamlake, one of the Magna Charta barons. He sat in the Parliament of 1264, and his barony, after passing through the Manners, Villiers, and Boyle families, is still extant. Lord Roos gave lands to " the brethren of the chivalry of the Temple of Solomon," and some accounts make him to have joined the Order. This, however, is probably an error. His benefactions would secure his burial here. Among the Vandalisms of the restorers was the destruction of the bodies of all these old heroes. In the process of rebuilding the Round Church they were all dug up and put in a shed, where, in the delicate words of Mr. Addison, " exposure to light and air unfortunately soon produced an unfavourable effect upon them." The corpses were visited by thousands of people, but before the dis- gusting exhibition was closed had crumbled into dust, which was heterogeneously thrown into a vaulted grave dug in the reconstructed Round Church. Not one of the effigies now marks the resting-place of the knight for whom it was made. Having been thoroughly "restored" by Richardson 56 The Inns of Court they were neatly disposed in four groups, and we may be thankful they were preserved at all, for all the thirteenth and fourteenth-century monuments were cast out and perished at the same time. They are all, evidently, of about the same date, and possibly, with one exception, by the same sculptor or school of sculptors. One is very inferior to the rest, and has therefore been some- times accounted the oldest. It would be quite as just to argue that it is the latest. In any case, all but two wear the same chain mail, with very long surcoafs. All have long shields of what is known as the heater shape. It would not be extravagant to assume that ten years do not separate the earliest from the latest. They clearly belong to the first half of the thirteenth century. A connecting link between them and the fourteenth century is the effigy of the bishop at the east end, and among the memorials destroyed was one of 1382. Richard Tulsington, who died in that year, was a clerk in Chancery. An earlier, but undated, clerk in Chancery was William Burgh, and the semi-Norman form of the epitaph induces us to put with his tablet one to Edmond Berford " d'Irland." Of the fifteenth century were tablets to chaplains dated 1420 and 1442. Of the sixteenth, at least two examples are to be seen in the triforium. One of them is represented in Cliurclies of London as TJie Chapels 57 standing on the north side of the altar, where it must have had an admirable effect in mitigating the stiff coldness of the Early English building. Camden describes it as a " fair raised monument adjoyning to the wall, whereon is the statue of a lawyer in his robe." It commemorates Edmund Plowden, an eminent jurist, who died in 1584, at the age of sixty-seven. In Camden's time there were many brasses, which he enumerates. There is not one now. A great many other monuments and tablets have also disappeared. Richard Martin, who was Recorder of London in 1 6 1 8, may still be seen on " a fair tomb of Alablastar," with a Latin epitaph ; and there is a tablet to John Selden. I looked in vain, at my last visit, for the verses on Anne Littleton, in which occurs the well-known couplet : " For while this jewel here is set, The grave is but a cabinet." But they may be on the Littleton monument. The not very sentimental Pepys, in 1666, just after the Great Fire, records a visit to the Temple Church, and speaks of " looking with pleasure on the monu- ments and epitaphs." The tablets that remain are chiefly remarkable for their heraldry, and probably no church in London was so rich in the coats of quarterings in which they of the seventeenth 58 The Inns of Court century did so greatly delight. Among those preserved, the tablets of Edward and Arthur Turner (1623 and 1651), of Vaughan, Busk, and Dodd, and some others, are well worth the climb to the triforium. The epitaphs are disappointing. There is not one now visible worthy of the talent of the presumably clever men who are commemorated. Camden has preserved this one : " Here lieth a John, a burning, shining light ; His name, life, actions, were all White." And on Plowden's monument, after a quotation from the Burial Service, there is a single line : "Vixi in freto. Morior in portu." At Corsham Church, in Wiltshire, before its restoration, there was a brass, dated, if I remember rightly, in 1703, and consequently one of the latest examples. It commemorated a Templar, and is worth quoting for its curious parody of Horace : " Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, Hie jacet corpus Georgii Downes, De Interiore Templo armigeri," etc. There is nothing in the Temple Church now so funny as this. The office of the Master has been a subject of much inquiry. There is a house not far from the church which bears the impress of Wren's hand, The Chapels 61 and was probably built immediately after the Great Fire, and here, from time immemorial, the Master has resided. Although he bears this title, he can lay claim to no authority except in the church, which, not being strictly speaking parochial, is not in the Bishop's jurisdiction, and the Master, on appointment by the Crown, is admitted without any institution or induction, simply on the receipt of the royal letters-patent. Before the Dissolution the Hospitallers appointed what they called the Gustos of the church. By the Act of 1540 the Crown reserved the presentation, and the Gustos then in office, William Ermsted, is styled " Master of the Temple." But Henry neglected to provide for his stipend and living as the Lord Prior of St. John had done, and the Master was thrown upon the mercy of the two societies. " There are certain buildings," says Camden, " on the east part of the churchyard, in part whereof he hath his lodgings, and the rest he letteth out to students. His dyet he hath in either house at the upper end of the Benchers' Table, except in the time of reading, it then being the reader's place. Besides the Master, there is a reader, who readeth Divine service each morning and evening, for which he hath his salary from the Master." Before the Dissolution the costs and charges of the clergy and the church were defrayed out of the rents accruing to the Hos- 62 The Inns of Court pitallers from Fickett's Field and Cotterell Garden. In the reign of James I., the Master, Dr. Mickle- thwaite, laid claim to such honour and jurisdiction as were held by both Temples to be incompatible with his position. The Master and the Benchers quarrelled accordingly, and the matter being referred by the Council to the Attorney-General, Noy, he decided against Dr. Micklethwaite. The more eminent Masters since the time of Hooker have been Brownrigg, afterwards Bishop of Exeter ; Gauden, who is believed to have written the Eikon Basilike, also Bishop of Exeter, and afterwards of Worcester; William Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul's ; and Thomas Sherlock, his son, who became Bishop of London in 1/48. That I have not been unduly severe against the senseless destruction wrought in the Temple Church before 1850 will appear from the following note, which I extract from Weale's Survey of London, published in 1853: " Restorers have no right to destroy the world's records (or their evidence) and oblige us to take their word only. We may have evidence that the church in Temple Lane is like that of the Templars ; but what is the next generation to do ? For them the church of the Templars exists no more. They have only an authorised copy." The chapel of Lincoln's Inn is, or was, by Inigo Jones, but has been enlarged. It has suffered even The Chapels 63 more than the Temple Church. Although the chapel was already too large for any congregation it ever contained, it was handed over to a noted Vandal, and the old proportions were utterly and needlessly destroyed. Before the recent changes, it was remarkable for its " boldness, stateliness, and harmony." The competent critic already quoted says of it : "We know of no mediaeval work even in which apertures of so low and broad a proportion produce, as here, no ungraceful or mean effect ; and though most of the works of this scenic architect differ from his masques only in being composed of more durable materials, there is an uncommon verisimilitude arising from every deception being carried out as if it were a reality. Thus, the buttresses here are as prominent and massive as if they sustained a real vaulting. To this, and the concavity of their outline, seems due much of the stately effect of this building." The building is raised on arches, which form a cloister, a picturesque effect in itself. It was built in 1623, and Dr. Donne preached the first sermon on Ascension Day. The old coloured windows are very good, and were probably designed by Bernard van Linge, a Fleming, but the actual glass was made by Hall, a glass-painter of Fetter Lane. They are of Jones's period, and were set up by subscribers, such as Noy, the Attorney-General, and Southampton and Pembroke, the friends of Shakespeare. Bishop Heber was preacher of Lincoln's Inn, and since his 64 The Inns of Court time Lonsdale, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, and Thomson, afterwards Archbishop of York. It is said that the daughter of the great Lord Brougham was the only female ever buried here. She died in 1839, and her epitaph, in Latin, is by Lord Wellesley. The grave of Prynne is unmarked. These vaults are mentioned by Butler in Hudibras, and by Pepys. There was an older chapel, but not on the same site, which was pulled down when this one was built. It was dedicated to St. Richard of Chichester, and must have been originally erected by one of the bishops of that see. The Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn fills a place very much like that of the Master of the Temple, and attends in hall during term-time a seat at the first bar table being assigned to him. The office was in existence as far back as the reign of Henry VI., but the Preachership only dates from 1581. The chapel of Gray's Inn vies in antiquity with either of the others ; but however ancient the fabric may be, it is devoid of interest, and contains no monuments worth mention. A proposal was recently made for its destruction, but it is being remodelled instead. The chapel or church of the Rolls has little to recommend it. That part which retains a trace of antiquity is of poor and late style. The monuments are of great interest and beauty. The principal is TOMB OF DEAN YOUNG IN THE CHAPEL OF THE ROLLS The Chapels 67 that of John Young, whose name frequently occurs in the annals of Henry VIII. He had been made Master of the Rolls when Dean of York, in the reign of Henry VII., and retained the office in the next reign for some ten years, when he died. The tomb has been attributed by all good judges to Torrigiano, and is of terra-cotta. The Dean, who is not to be confounded with his contemporary and namesake, the Bishop of Gallipoli, is represented lying on an altar-tomb, with his hands crossed and an expression of devotion on his face. He died in 1516, and the monument was put up by his executors in the same year. Behind the figure is a relief showing the face of the Redeemer between two angels' heads. The extreme beauty of the figure and its accessories must be seen to be appreciated. There are two other fine monuments in this chapel : one to Sir Richard Allington (died 1561), and one to Lord Bruce of Kinloss, Master of the Rolls in the time of James I., who died in 1610. Some very eminent men have been " Preachers at the Rolls," among them the late Dr. Brewer, so well known for historical research. In his time it was that Sir George Jessel, a Jew, was Master, which, when we remember that the house was originally founded by Henry III. for the reception of converted Jews, seems a curious coincidence. It is said that on one occasion, at least, the Master went to hear Dr. Brewer preach. Bishop Burnet 68 The Inns of Court held the office in this chapel in the time of Charles II., and, having preached on a "Guy Fawkes " day, in 1684, on the text, " Save me from the lion's mouth, for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns" (Psalm xxii. 21), was, it is said, dismissed for a sermon levelled at the royal arms. Butler's Sermons at the Rolls are still read. It was rumoured that the chapel was condemned lately by the people who go about to destroy churches in the city ; but we are told now that it has been reprieved, and is to be made into a kind of museum. Stow's few lines about the Rolls are worth quoting whole : "It standeth not farre from the old Temple, but in the mid- way betweene the old Temple and the new, in the which house all such Jewes and infidels as were converted to the Christian faith were ordayned and appointed (under an honest rule of life) sufficient maintenaunce, whereby it came to passe, that in short time there weere gathered a great number of converts, which were baptized, instructed in the doctrine of Christ, and there lived, under a learned Christian appointed to governe them : since the which time, to wit, in the year 1290, all the Jewes in England were banished out of the realme, whereby the number of converts in this place was almost decayed ; and therefore, in the year 1377, this house was annexed by Pattent to William Burstall, Clearke Custos Rotulorum, or Keeper of the Rolles of the Chauncerie, by Edward III., in the one and fiftieth yeare of his raigne : and this first Maistre of the Rolles was sworne in Westminster hall, at the table of marble stone : since the which time, that house has been commonly called the Rolles in Chauncerie Lane." Ill THE INNER TEMPLE The oldest Hall The Arms Origin of the Pegasus Plan of the old Temple The Lord Prior of St. John A Manciple The Serjeants The Second Hall Population of the Inner Temple The Buildings The New Hall The Library. WE have seen in a previous chapter why this part of the Temple is called " Inner." But a different question, and one not so easily answered, relates to the separation of the Inner and Middle Temples as corporate bodies,, or Societies. It is further complicated by the fact that the Hall of the Middle Temple is ancient that is to say, it was built before the Gothic tradition was quite extinct while that of the Inner Temple is new a " Vandalic " building of very poor character. But as is so often the case in matters of this kind, appearances are wholly deceptive. It would seem that when the lawyers first came to the Temple, 70 The Inns of Court the hall of the Templars was standing, and was used by them as it was. But the Society grew larger and larger, until it overflowed the Templars' hall, and a new one had to be built, for what at first were the junior members of the Society. So, by degrees, they drifted apart ; and the new hall was built on the land previously, it is probable, only a garden or orchard of which I have already spoken as the Middle Temple, within the city boundary, but to westward of the Templars' original house. We thus arrive approximately at the cause, but not at the date, of the separation. When we come to treat of the Middle Temple, we may be able to show its origin more distinctly ; but so far, in treating of the Inner Temple only, we may assert as a general conclusion, a working hypothesis, that it represents the original colony of " students of the law," who first settled themselves in the old build- ings of the Knights of the Chivalry of the Temple of Solomon. Another and very similar question is that of the coat -of -arms. Here heraldry would deceive us as architecture might have done. The arms of the Middle Temple, like its hall, are ancient. The arms of the Inner Temple, besides being bad heraldry, are modern. But, here again, we must not trust the evidence of our senses. It is the Middle Temple coat that is new, or compara- tively newly assumed, and the Inner Temple coat The Inner Temple 71 that is old that is, it was assumed before the Middle Templars had assumed theirs. The difference in age is not very great, but there is a difference. When the Order was first founded, as we know, heraldry can hardly be said to have existed. The Templars' vow of poverty was observed. The saying that they could only afford a single horse for two knights was probably true ; and their badge, the badge of poverty, was a horse bearing two riders. It hardly amounted to a coat-of-arms. Stow (first edition, page 326) says correctly : " Matthew Paris crieth out on them for their, pride, who, being at the first so poore as they had but one horse to serve two of them, in token whereof they gave in their scale, two men riding upon one horse, yet suddainely they waxed so insolent, that they disdained other orders, and sorted themselves with noble men." It is evident that Stow did not account this a coat-of-arms ; yet it partook, as far as a badge can, of the heraldic character. If we look in such a book as Burke's General Armoury, we see how the question is further complicated by carelessness, ignorance, or stupidity, or a mixture of all three. There we find " Temple Hospital " and this coat-of-arms, " Gules, a cross argent." " Temple Hospital " seems a " con- tradiction in terms." The Templars and the Hospitallers had both crosses in their arms, but 72 The Inns of Court if anything is certain about such early heraldry, it is that " Gules, a cross argent," is the arms of the Knights of St. John, or the Hospitallers. Whether in the Inner Temple they continued to use the horse and two men I cannot say. In any case, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, just about the time when Stow was writing his Survey, " Master Gerard Leigh, a member of the College of Heralds," persuaded the authorities to abandon their old device, and to assume that of a Pegasus about the most inappropriate symbol they could possibly have found. It may, however, have grown out of " azure, a horse bearing two men, argent." The two men became the wings of the Pegasus. The Society of the Middle Temple continued to bear the arms assigned to the Templars, a red cross on a white ground, with a paschal lamb in the centre. Thus, as I have said, the arms, like the halls, are deceptive, and the Inner Temple, with its new hall on the old foundation, has, it may be, the old badge furbished up as Pegasus. Taking the Inner Temple Hall as representing that of the Knights, we can reconstruct, to a certain but limited extent, the old military monastery. The Chaplain, or Master, still lives to eastward of the church, only that his house has been moved back to the end of his garden instead of forming part of the irregular quadrangle. At right angles to it would The Inner Temple 73 probably be the strong place of which we read. This treasury was at least twice robbed by a needy king. In 1232 Henry III. took from it the money and jewels of Hubert de Burgh, whom, in gratitude for his guardianship of the realm and long devotion during the King's minority, he had imprisoned in 74 The Inns of Court the Tower. Edward I., in 1283, visited the treasury of the Temple, and, by way of seeing to the security, as he said, of his mother's jewellery, he broke open the coffers of such as had laid their money up there, and took away a thousand pounds. I should be disposed to put this treasury where the library is now, and the house of the Treasurer next to it, as it is still. From this point, parallel with the church, was the cloister, which turned the corner, and led up to the church porch. Between the cloister and the garden was the great hall parallel, as is the present one, with the church. North of the church porch, extending towards Fleet Street, were the lodgings of the Bishop of Ely, including a chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury This would form one side, probably the east, of Inner Temple Lane, and east of it again, north of the church, was the cemetery. Much of this we can gather from a survey made by the Mayor of London at the King's command soon after the dissolution of the Templars. We further learn that there were at least two gates, and that between the cemetery and Fleet Street there were thirteen houses, and that the precincts were bounded on the east, presumably near where King's Bench Walk is now, by a wall, which ran northward up to the street. In the year 1337 there was a further inquiry, and from it we learn that by that The Inner Temple 75 time a second hall and four chambers had been built, together with a kitchen, and a stable, and a house outside the great gate. These buildings I take to be the beginnings of a Middle Temple ; but it will be best to treat of them separately in their proper order. The old gate was evidently the gate to Inner Temple Lane, and opened nearest to the church. In 1340 Edward III. gave any of the royal property or rights that remained in his hands to the Lord Philip Thane, then prior of St. John, for 100, which the Lord Prior promised to pay towards his expedition into France. This Lord Prior granted to Hugh Lichfield, a priest, who was custos of the Temple Church, the rents of Cotterell's Garden or Fickett's Field, as already mentioned, and there is further mention of a place whose very identity was long forgotten. Thane allowed Lichfield a thousand faggots a year, to be cut in his wood at Lilleston. Where was Lilleston ? The name survives in the shortened form of Lisson, the northern district of the parish of St. Marylebone ; while the wood is commemorated in St. John's Wood. That the inhabitants of the Temple at this time kept commons, or dined together in hall, is proved incidentally by a passage in Chaucer, quoted by Addison. The manciple, or purveyor, in the Canterbury Tales, purveyed for the Temple : 76 The Inns of Court " A gentil manciple was there of Temple, Of whom achatours mighten take ensample, For to ben wise in buying of vitaille." The number, even, of those for whom he bought " vitaille " is given : " Of maisters had he mo than thrice ten, That were of law expert and curious." In the time of Henry VIII. the wages of the purveyor, or manciple, of the Temple were xxxvj 5 a year. But in the time of Chaucer there were, besides the lawyers, a number of survivors of the retainers and servants of the old Templars. Some of them had pensions allowed them, and others seem to have retained a residence, but to have worked for their living. Robert Styfford had been a chaplain. On condition he continued to take services, he had certain allowances. Others are named, and to some was assigned " a gown of the class of free serving brethren of the order of the Temple each year ; one old garment out of the stock of old garments belonging to the brethren ; one mark a year for their shoes," and so on ; and their sons, if any, were to be offered employment at the daily work of the house. In the same reign of Edward III., in the year J 333> judges were first knighted, and about the same time an order was formed by the professors . The Inner Temple 79 of the common law, who had the exclusive privilege of practising in the Court of Common Pleas. These practitioners imitated the second degree of the old Templars. The word serjeant means briefly servant, and is supposed to translate exactly the Latin serviens. The new order were " the King's servants-at-law," servientes damini Regis ad legein. Under the old Knights Templars their fratrcs servientes were armigeri or esquires. The serjeants- at-law took this honourable name, and marked their rank by red caps, under which, as in the East at the present day, a linen coif was worn. No Arab or Egyptian puts on a fez without a linen cap under it. Some have conjectured that the lawyer's coif was intended for the concealment of the tonsure of such practitioners as had taken orders. Until the recent abolition of the Serjeants, every judge assumed the coif on appointment, and addressed and was addressed by other Serjeants as " brother." Whether the second hall grew out of an overcrowding of the first, or represents the retainers and other persons of second rank, is a question for future discussion. What is certain is not milch ; but, in 1337, one of the two halls was kept for the representatives of the serving brethren. When the lawyers came in, we only know at first of their using one hall, that now denominated of the Inner Temple. The numbers grew so rapidly that, in the 8o reign of Henry VI., they were organised into t\vo bodies, who at least profess an absolute equality. At first all dined together in one hall ; then the division came but still, in memory of their former union, the benchers of one Temple dined with the benchers of the other every year. The charter by which James I. granted the site to the lawyers is addressed to both societies, and they have, therefore, an equal interest in the document. A deed of parti- tion with a plan annexed was signed in 1732. The population of the Inner Temple is con- siderably larger than that of the other society. According to the day census made of the city in 1891, there were 982 employers in the Inner Temple, as against 857 in the Middle Temple, and these 982 gave employment to 444 men, 92 women, and 42 children. The Inner Temple is divided by a very arbitrary line from the Middle, and it would be quite impos- sible for a stranger to be sure of any building belonging to one or the other unless it is marked. Roughly speaking, the church may be taken as a common centre, but Lamb Building, which is con- siderably to the eastward of any imaginary line drawn north and south through the church, belongs to the Middle Temple. The Master's house is common property, and the gate at the foot of Middle Temple Lane is divided between the two societies. The Inner Temple 83 Geographically speaking, it would seem almost certain another division of Temple territory took place when Serjeants' Inn was built, because it lies within the line of the straight eastern wall, which stretched right up to Fleet Street, and separated the Temple from the Whitefriars. The buildings are extensive, but the hall and library are hardly worthy of a society so great and wealthy. The hall was built on the ancient site in 1869, and was formally opened by one of the princesses. It has a singularly mean appearance which I cannot easily account for, but it must be owing to the want of proportion. It is not very easy for an architect to make a building look larger than it is ; but a good many modern architects, and especially those who profess what they think to be " Gothic," have contrived to make their buildings look smaller than they really are. This is the case with Mr. Sydney Smirke's Inner Temple Hall. The interior, with a fine open-timber roof, is much better. It is ninety-four feet long, forty-one feet wide, and forty feet high to the springing of the hammer-beams. There is a good bay-window at the dais end, with heraldic glass. Pegasus figures everywhere. The screen, over which is the minstrels' gallery, is very handsomely carved. In fact, so successfully has the architect disguised his exterior, that one rubs one's eyes and wonders where all the size and magnificence 84 The Inns of Court of the interior are packed away. There is an interesting crypt under the north, or rather, north- western end, but " thoroughly restored." The old hall had been restored, and partly rebuilt, and otherwise altered and improved by successive generations of treasurers, until there was nothing left but a stucco painted edifice in the pointed style as understood about 1816, the date of the last operations. There was nothing for it but a completely new building, and we can only be sorry the result is so disappointing. The library is similarly disguised. It looks as if it consisted of an ordinary set of chambers, but the interior is spacious, extensive, and convenient, though wanting in any one good central hall, like the library of the Middle Temple or that of the Guildhall. Selden's wonderful library was housed, after his death, in the Temple, and the society might doubtless have secured it by a little liberality and vigilance. But the opportunity was let slip, and the collection was allowed to go to the Bodleian at Oxford. The best architectural effects in the Inner Temple are to be found in a remarkable series of doorways, chiefly in King's Bench Walk. They look as if they must have been designed by Wren. All this part of the Temple was burnt in the Great Fire. I do not know for certain that Wren was employed here or on the Master's house : the work is very like his. As, owing to some rule or regulation, I have not been accorded leave to examine the manuscripts in the library, I am obliged to leave the question unsettled. No doubt, if Wren was employed, there must be a 88 The Inns of Court record of the fact. What may be done by pure proportion, without any ornament, is well exemplified by the house, which is simplicity itself, yet produces a pleasant and restful impression, especially on an eye fatigued by the fussy and meaningless irregular- ities of the hall. The Inner Temple Gate, built about 1609, has on it the badge of Henry, Prince of Wales, eldest son of James I. ; and on the front of a very much " restored " building above it is a ridiculous inscription about Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey. It is called the Little Gate in some early documents. The best view, perhaps, in the Inner Temple is obtained by standing at the foot of King's Bench Walk, and looking towards the north-west. IV THE INNER TEMPLE (Continued} Eminent Inhabitants Charles Lamb a Native of the Temple Thackeray Cowper Shirley Boswell Johnson Officials of an Inn of Court Old Usages Eating Dinners The Menu Pass the Bottle Laundresses Ladies in the Temple. THE eminent inhabitants of the Inner Temple have been numerous. But so far as I know, only one person who attained to fame was born in it. Charles Lamb writes, in the Essays of Elia, " I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple." He goes on to praise its church, its halls, its gardens : " 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 ? " He adds fervently, " A man would give something to have been born in such places." Elsewhere, he is not so complimentary. " Our place of final destination I don't mean the grave, but No. 4 Inner Temple Lane looks out upon a gloomy, 90 The Inns of Court churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it." Johnson's Buildings are on the site. In 1817 he finally left the Temple. He wrote to a friend from lodgings near Covent Garden, " Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed, it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now 'tis out, and I am easy ! We can never strike root so deep in any other ground." Just as only one man of the first eminence seems to have been born in the Temple, so, too, I only meet with the name of a single man of the highest genius who died there. This was Oliver Goldsmith, but he lived and died in Brick Court, which is in the Middle Temple, as we shall have occasion to see by and by. Lamb also lodged for a time at 16 Mitre Court Buildings, a pistol-shot off Baron Maseres (who used to walk about in the costume of George II.). The court was rebuilt in 1830. Lamb lived in the top storey. " Bring your glass," he writes, "and I will show you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river, so as by perking upon my haunches, and supporting my carcase with 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 bed." He seems to have gravitated to the Temple, and certainly had a genuine fondness for the place. " I The Inner Temple 91 repeat to this day," he says, " no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser when he speaks of this spot : ' There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, Where whilome wont the Templer Knights to bide Till they decayed through pride.' " " Indeed, it is," he continued, " the most elegant spot in the Metropolis." Another delightful essayist loved the Temple and lived for some time in, or to speak more strictly, " occupied " chambers which have now disappeared, at 10 Crown Office Row. William Makepeace Thackeray had been called to the bar in 1834, and he shared his apartments with Tom Taylor. He often speaks of the Temple, in which the scene of so much of Pendennis is to be found. In the first volume he sums up its memories in a well-known passage, not too long to quote : " Nevertheless, those venerable Inns which have the ' Lamb and Flag ' and the ' Winged Horse ' for their ensigns, have attractions for persons who inhabit them, and a share of rough comforts and freedom, which men always remember with pleasure. I don't know whether the student of law permits himself the refreshment of enthusiasm, or indulges in poetical reminiscences as he passes by historical chambers and says, ' Yonder Eldon lived ; upon this site Coke mused upon Lyttleton ; here Chitty toiled ; here 92 The Inns of Co^lrt Barnwell and Alderson joined in their famous labours ; here Byles composed his great work upon bills, and Smith compiled his immortal leading cases ; here Gustavus still toils with Solomon to aid him.' But the man of letters can't but love the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, or peopled by their creations as real to us at this day as the authors whose children they were ; and Sir Roger de Coverley walking in the Temple Garden, and discoursing with Mr. Spectator about the beauties in hoops and patches who are sauntering over the grass, is just as lively a figure to me as old Samuel Johnson rolling through the fog with the Scotch gentleman at his heels on their way to Dr. Goldsmith's chambers in Brick Court, or Harry Fielding, with inked ruffles and a wet towel round his head, dashing off articles at mid- night for the Covent Garden Journal while the printer's boy is asleep in the passage." In another place in the same book (ii. 104) he writes : " On the Sunday evening the Temple is commonly calm. The chambers are for the most part vacant. The great lawyers are giving grand dinner-parties at their houses in the Belgravian or Tyburnian districts ; the agreeable young barristers are absent attending those parties, and paying their respects to Mr. Kewsey's excellent claret, or Mr. Justice Ermine's accomplished daughters ; the uninvited are partaking of the economic joint and the modest half-pint of wine at the Club, entertaining themselves and the rest of the company in the Club room with circuit jokes and points of wit and law. Nobody is in chambers at all except poor Mr. Cockle, who is ill, and whose laundress is making him gruel ; or Mr. Toodle, who is an amateur of the flute, and whom you may hear piping solitary from his chambers in the second floor ; or : i ' >* f> . The Inner Temple 95 young Tiger, the student, from whose open windows comes a great gush of cigar-smoke, and at whose door are a quantity of dishes and covers bearing the insignia of ' Dick's ' or the ' Cock.' Of Dickens in the Temple we have something to note farther on. The memories of William Cowper here are of the most melancholy character. He came to live in the Inner Temple in 1754 or 1755, and his rooms had nearly been the scene of a dismal tragedy. He wrote in after years : " Not one hesitating thought now remained, but I fell greedily to the execution of my purpose. My garter was made of a broad piece of scarlet binding with a sliding buckle, being sewn together at the ends. By the help of the buckle I formed a noose, and fixing it about my neck, straining it so tight that I hardly left a passage for my breath or for the blood to circulate. The tongue of the buckle held it fast. At each corner of the bed was placed a wreath of carved work, fastened by an iron pin which passed up through the midst of it ; the other part of the garter, which made a loop, I slipped over one of them and hung by it some seconds, drawing up my feet under me, that they might not touch the floor. But the iron bent and the carved wood slipped off, and the garter with it. I then fastened it to the frame of tester, winding it round and tying it in a strong knot. The frame broke short and let me down again. " The third effort was more likely to succeed. I set the door open, which reached to within a foot of the ceiling. By the help of a chair I could command the top of it, and the loop, being large enough to admit a large angle of the door, was easily fixed so as not to slip off again. I pushed away 96 The Inns of Court the chair with my feet, and hung at my whole length. While I hung there, I distinctly heard a voice say three times, ' Tis GOLDSMITH'S GRAVE. over.' Though I am sure of the fact, and was so at the time, yet it did not at all alarm me, or affect my resolution. I hung so_long that I lost all sense, all consciousness of existence. The Inner Temple 97 When I came to myself again I thought I was in hell ; the sound of my own dreadful groans was all that I heard, and a feeling like that produced by a flash of lightning just be- ginning to seize upon me passed over my whole body. In a few seconds I found myself fallen on my face to the floor. In about half a minute I recovered my feet, and, reeling and struggling, stumbled into bed again. Soon after I got into bed I was surprised to hear a voice in the dining-room, where the laundress was lighting a fire. ... I sent her to a friend, to whom I related the whole affair, and despatched him to my kinsman at the coffee-house. As soon as the latter arrived, I pointed to the broken garter which lay in the middle of the room, and apprised him also of the attempt I had been making. His words were : ' My dear Mr. Cowper, you terrify me ! To be sure, you cannot hold office at this rate. Where is the deputation ? ' I gave him the key of the drawer where it was deposited, and his business requiring his immediate attendance, he took it away with him ; and thus ended all my connection with the Parliament office." Eventually the future poet was removed to an asylum at St. Albans, and recovered the use of his faculties ; but he never returned to live in London, and even the place of his residence in the Temple is unknown. Other poets are more or less remotely connected with the Temple. We shall quote Shakespeare about it farther on. Here it is enough to note that Beaumont entered as a student of the Inner Temple, 3rd November 1600. He may have seen Shakespeare play in the Middle Temple Hall, thirteen months later. But, long before his time, H 98 The Inns of Coztrt Gower and Chaucer are said to have been students of the Temple there was probably but one in those days and it has been recorded, but only on hearsay evidence, that Chaucer, while he was here, beat a mendicant friar in Fleet Street, and was fined for it no very unlikely occurrence. Shirley, the dramatist, the author of " The glories of our blood and state," was burnt out of his house adjoining the Inner Temple Gate by the Great Fire of 1666. Edmund Burke, " commonly called the Sublime," in his early life in London had a lodging at the " Pope's Head," over the shop of one Jacob Robinson, bookseller and publisher, just within the Inner Temple gateway. Boswell found Johnson living at i Inner Temple Lane, and took lodgings near himself. " Johnson's house," says Mr. Laurence Hutton, from whose delightful Literary Landmarks of London I have already borrowed much, " has since been removed, giving place to the more imposing, but less in- teresting, Johnson's Buildings, which stand upon the site." In Boswell there is a diverting account of Dr. Johnson being visited by Topham Beauclerk and a certain Madame de Boufflers in 1763. The French lady was entertained by his conversation for some time, and then the visitors left. When they were making their way to the coach, Beau- clerk heard a sound like thunder. It was Johnson, The Inner Temple 99 who, " on a little recollection, had taken it into his head that he ought to have done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality, and, eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was hurrying down the stairs in violent agitation." He overtook the pair before they reached the Gate, and brushing between them, seized Madame de Boufflers by the hand, and conducted her, bareheaded, to the coach in Fleet Street. He remained at No. I about five years from 1760. There are many interesting contemporary notices of his stay there, besides the above. Boswell, in 1763, says that " Dr. Johnson's library was contained in two garrets over his chambers, where Lintot, son of the celebrated bookseller of that name, had formerly his warehouse. I found a number of good books, but very dusty and in great confusion. The floor was strewed with manuscript leaves in Johnson's own handwriting, which I beheld with a degree of veneration, supposing they might, perhaps, contain portions of the Rambler, or of Rasselas. I observed an apparatus for chemical experiments, of which Johnson was all his life fond. The place seemed to be very favourable for retirement and meditation." Croker, in his Johnsoniana, gives part of a letter written by Ozias Humphrey, R.A., describing a visit he paid to the rooms : " The day after I wrote my last letter to you I was intro- duced to Mr. Johnson by a friend. We passed through three ioo The Inns of Court very dirty rooms to a little one that looked like an old counting-house, where this great man was sat at breakfast. The furniture of the room was a very large deal writing-desk, an old walnut-tree table, and five ragged chairs of four different sets. I was very much struck with Mr. Johnson's appearance, and could hardly help thinking him a madman for some time, as he sat raving over his breakfast like a lunatic. He is a very large man, and was dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat, with breeches that were brown also (although they had been crimson), and an old black wig ; his shirt-collar and sleeves were unbuttoned, his stockings well down about his feet, which had on them (by way of slippers) an old pair of shoes. He had not been up long when we called on him, which was near one o'clock. He seldom goes to bed before two in the morning ; and Mr. Reynolds (Sir Joshua) tells me he generally drinks tea about an hour after he has supper. We had been some time with him before he began to talk, but at length he began, and, faith, to some purpose ; everything he says is as correct as a second edition; 'tis almost impossible to argue with him, he is so sententious and so knowing." On May the 24th, 1763, a week after his first introduction, Boswell, for the first time, called on Johnson ; his account is, as usual, photographic : "His chambers were on the first floor of No. i Inner Temple Lane. . . . He received me very courteously, but it must be confessed that his apartment and furniture and morning dress were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty ; he had on a little, old, shrivelled, unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head ; his shirt- neck and knees of his breeches were loose ; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly The Inner Temple 101 peculiarities were forgotten the moment he began to talk. He told me that he generally went abroad at four in the afternoon, and seldom came home till two in the morning. I took the liberty to ask if he did not think it wrong to live thus, and not make more of his great talents. He owned it was a bad habit." BoswelPs rooms were in Farrer's Building, opposite Johnson's, and, like it, have been rebuilt since. He seems to have given up his chambers when Johnson left the Temple in 1765. Boswell entered his name at the Inner Temple, intending, without his father's knowledge, to go to the English bar. This design he did not then carry out, though he again entered his name in 1775, and was duly called, but not until eleven years later. The ideal of life in the Temple is that of a monastery. But, as a fact, not many of the lawyers live where they practise. Even of those who actually live, or lodge, in the place, most have chambers elsewhere. One or two, to our knowledge, have residential chambers in the build- ing of one society, and chambers, or a chamber, for work in the other. These, however, must be few. The Inn consists of the annual Treasurer and his permanent deputy, and of a " Bench," constituted by the " Masters of the Bench," or briefly " Benchers." There are other officers, but these are the most im- portant ; the Reader, who usually becomes Treasurer 102 The Inns of Court in the following year, being the only one who need be named. It used to be the Reader's business to give a reading or lecture during the dinner in hall, but the practice has long died out. As in other professions now, examinations prevail, and the student finds that it is no longer enough to eat dinners. Immense numbers of men who can never intend to practise law come forward every year to be called to the bar, and then drift off into something else the more easily as many official positions are open only to barristers-at-law. Old usages are strictly kept up in the Temple. As each afternoon wanes, the Porter goes through the Courts, winding his horn to tell of the approach of the dinner-hour, which is nominally 5.30. The student must dine three times in term to qualify for the bar, and likewise the bencher, who would be Treasurer in his year, must duly dine in hall. Benchers are self-elected among the senior barristers ; but what control they have over the Treasurer, in what way the ^40,000 a year, which is said to be the income of the society, is expended, and in what proportion these are matters shrouded in the most impenetrable secrecy. A barrister, once called, has neither rights nor duties in his Inn, but for four months in the year an excellent dinner at cost price is provided. At 6.30 the doors are closed. Six, sharp, is the usual hour. The gown The Inner Temple 103 is necessary. A minute before six the senior Panier panier is the law term for waiter beckons to the barristers, who then form in procession and advance up the hall. They seat themselves in the order of seniority, and once set must not change. Next, the benchers issue from the Parliament Room, at the east side the Treasurer and the rest of his fellow-benchers according to the date of their election. As they come in the two senior barristers rise in their places and shake hands with them. When all are seated on the dais, with the Treasurer in the chair, the Panier bangs a big book for grace ; all stand up, there are two words of Latin, bang again goes the big book, and all sit down to trencher-work. There are rules for the eating and the drinking very anciently established, as intricate and as much guided by precedent as an ecclesiastical suit, or a bill in the old Court of Chancery with one difference : no change is ever made, and no diner desires reform. You pay for your dinner beforehand, and the menu of the day is put up outside the Hall ; but you know that on every Thursday, whether it is June or December, there will be roast beef; and on every Friday there will be chicken and tongue. The first of the immutable precedents is seniority, but the second, that the wine goes round with the sun, prevails over it. All are divided into messes of 104 The Inns of Court four. At the top table are eight diners, so it forms two messes, and each has a double allowance of wine, namely, two bottles of port and four of claret ; but all lower messes have but one bottle of port and two of claret Besides these allowances there is excellent draught beer at discretion. Each member of a mess helps himself, and passes the dish on. There are various ceremonials connected with " pass- ing the bottle," which need not be detailed here ; and at seven grace is said as before, and the two senior barristers stand up and bow to each bencher as he passes out Another standing institution must be mentioned. The service of the chambers is performed by " laundresses." These women must be of a certain age ; they are generally widows, and, as a class, they are discreet, honest, and sober, though not highly paid ; but why they are called laundresses has never transpired, as they seldom wash them- selves, and never anything else. They, with the clerks many of them mere boys form the bulk of the day population. The whole number of inhabited houses in the Inner Temple is said to be forty-two, which seems large in comparison with the twenty-three of Lincoln's Inn, but is exceeded considerably by the fifty-six at Gray's Inn. Mr. Jeaffreson speaks of the " last of the ladies " who had quarters in the Temple, but, long since his The Inner Temple 105 book was published, I remember visiting the bride of a barrister, the daughter of a late distinguished statesman, who had chambers for several months in the Inner Temple. The houses mentioned by Mr. Jeaffreson, in Essex Street, looked into the Middle Temple garden ; but I rather doubt if they were actually within the boundaries. He speaks of attending dances and other festivities in one of them in 1852, and of waltzing in a drawing-room, " the windows of which looked upon the spray of the fountain." In the forty years which have elapsed since then, many things have happened, and it may be doubted if a single private house remains in the street. THE INNER TEMPLE (Concluded} Eminent Benchers The "Black Finches" A Royal Bencher Old Names Thurlow Tenterden Lamb's Benchers Hon. Daines Barrington Baron Maseres Ellenborough Jekyll and Sydney Smith Thesiger Inner Temple Hall Paper Buildings King's Bench Walks The Dials The Blackamoor The Last Revels What is an Utter Barrister ? THE eminent inhabitants of the Inner Temple of the legal profession have been very numerous. The list of benchers begins with the name of Sir Thomas Lyttleton, the author of the famous Treatise on Tenures. He died in 1481, and lies buried in the Cathedral of Worcester. Sir John Pakington was another Worcestershire Templar. He was Treasurer in 1528, and it is recorded that Henry VIII. allowed him, on account of his age and infirmities, to wear his hat in the King's presence. Sir William Pole was Treasurer in 1 5 64, and wrote the history of Devonshire, his native county. Richard Onslow, The Inner Temple 107 Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, died when he was only forty-three, and yet had risen to be Recorder of London, Attorney-General of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Solicitor-General. He was excused from his second reading, as Autumn Reader, in 1566, on account of his Speakership. The name of Lucas occurs very often among the lists of benchers. The family came from a place near Colchester, and was much distin- guished later in the great Civil War, when, after the siege of Colchester, in 1648, Sir Charles Lucas was shot in cold blood by order of Fairfax. His grand- father, Thomas Lucas, was a bencher of the Inner Temple in 1550, and his great-grandfather in 1542. In an epitaph at Westminster Abbey, we are told of the Lucas family that " all the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous." Sir Edward Coke, who died in 1633, was a bencher before he became a chief justice, and wrote upon Lyttleton. His portrait is still in the hall of the Inner Temple. Another great Templar of the period was Sir Julius Caesar, son of Caesar Adelmare, Queen Elizabeth's Italian physician. He had a brother Dean of Ely. This classically -named lawyer was Master of the Rolls in 1614. When he died, in 1636, his widow raised over his grave, in St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, the famous monument on which, on a marble scroll to imitate a parchment deed, the old man binds io8 The Inns of Court himself cheerfully to pay the debt of nature. It cost ;iio, and was designed by himself, and carved by Nicholas Stone. Two other Caesars, his brother and his son, also appear in the list of benchers. Another name which we meet with more than once is that of Coventry. Sir Thomas Coventry was a judge of the Common Pleas in 1606. His son, of the same name, was also a bencher, and became Lord Keeper in 1625, and a peer in 1628. He was the great advocate of Ship Money, and probably did as much as any one to ruin the cause of his master, Charles I. His last act was to summon the Parliament of 1640 almost as great a mistake as the ship money but he died, fortunately for himself, before it assembled. His want of knowledge of everything outside his own profession -a peculiarity, as I have said, of so many lawyers was proverbial ; and Campbell notices " his utter contempt for literature and literary men." Another Lord Keeper who was a bencher of the Inner Temple was Edward, Lord Lyttleton, of Mounslow, a descendant of Sir Thomas Lyttleton, already mentioned. Under him the Long Parliament, which Coventry had summoned, got out of hand, Strafford was beheaded Lyttleton, pleading illness, was not at the trial and finally Charles betook himself to the north, and the Lord Keeper followed him. At Oxford, in 1645, he raised a force of volunteers The Inner Temple 109 from among the lawyers, and died from a chill, caught while drilling them, in August 1645. He was buried in Christ Church Cathedral. During the Commonwealth the greatest of the benchers was, no doubt, John Selden. He died in 1654, and was buried in the Temple Church " neare the steps where the Saints' bell hangeth." He never attained high legal office, but was chiefly known for his Titles of Honour, and other works in legal antiquity. At the Restoration a bencher of the Inner Temple became a judge of the King's Bench. This was Sir Thomas Twysden, who was created a baronet in 1666. His title became extinct in 1841. Several members of the Finch family have been benchers of -the Inner Temple, the greatest of them having been Sir Heneage Finch, made Lord Chancellor in 1675, and Earl of Nottingham in 1 68 1. Three times he sat as High Steward at State trials, and was remarkable for his dark com- plexion a point in which his son, who succeeded a cousin as sixth Earl of Winchelsea, resembled him. He had inherited " Nottingham House," now Kensington Palace, from his father, Recorder Finch. Many were the local jokes about the " black Finches " of Kensington. The Recorder had been a bencher, and died in 1631. At least four more of the family have also been benchers ; but Lord Keeper Finch was of Gray's Inn. no The Inns of Court The first and last royal bencher of this Society was elected after the Restoration, namely, the Duke of York, afterwards James II. As we come down to more modern times, the old names are very constantly repeated. Six of the Crokes were on the bench, beginning with Sir John, who was Treasurer in 1597, and ending with Sir Alexander, who only died in 1842. This last- named was the author of the delightful essay on mediaeval rhyming Latin verse, which did so much to revive the study of that beautiful kind of devotional poetry. He was Treasurer in 1830. I have already noticed the Finches. One cannot be sure that the numerous Wrights and Williamses and Powells, or the four Johnsons, or the three Harrisons, or the three Jacksons, were necessarily members of the same family. But we come again and again to Blencowe, to Bromley, to Gifford, to Hare, to Mellish, and Mellor, and Moreton. There has been a Chief Baron and a Baron Pollock, father and son. There are also four Wests in the list and three Wards, all probably respectively related. For many centuries a candidate had to show at least three generations of " gentle blood." Of the men of the reign of George III., and since his day to the present, the number of great lawyers who belonged to the Inner Temple is very remark- able. Beginning with the time of King George's The Inner Temple in accession, we find Thurlovv, who had been called six years before, already in full practice. His chambers were in Fig-tree Court. In 1762 he became a bencher; in 1770 he was Treasurer; and when he died in I 806, he was senior bencher, and was buried in the Temple Church. I have already had occasion to mention him. Thurlow's overbearing manners, especially as a judge, for he was Recorder of Tarn- worth, and afterwards Lord Chancellor for fourteen years, were proverbial. He had a special aversion as to Arden, afterwards Lord Alvanley. On the other hand, he would always listen to Scott, after- wards Lord Eldon. Like another overbearing Chancellor, the infamous Jeffreys, he was very fond of music. Mr. Jeaffreson, in his Book about Lawyers, draws almost an affecting picture of Thurlow in his old age, with his daughter playing Handel for him. He also, in the same chapter (ii. 41), tells us of little Charley Abbot, the barber's son of Canterbury, trying and failing to obtain a place in the Cathedral as a chorister, and goes on to say that, when he had become Chief Justice and a peer, he pointed out to Judge Richardson an old man who had been the successful competitor. " The only being," he observed, " that I ever envied." Lord Tenterden was of the Inner Temple, but does not seem ever to have become a bencher. In 1763, George Grenville, Prime Minister that year, became H2 The Inns of Court a bencher. In 1 766, Thomas Coventry (a descend- ant of Lord Keeper Coventry, who had been a bencher in 1614), and in 1774, Francis Maseres were elected, and are specially bracketed by Charles Lamb with Salt, Reade, Wharry, Twopenny, and some otherwise long-forgotten names. He also mentions Daines Barrington, best remembered as the friend of Gilbert White, of Selborne, and he sums up Coventry in a sentence full of his early memories. He " made a solitude of children where- ever he came, for they fled his intolerable presence as they would have shunned an Elisha bear." Yet there must have been something good in his character. Coventry was penurious in his habits, but capable of great generosity to those who needed help, and Lamb records as a fact that he " gave away 3 0,000 at once in his lifetime to a blind charity." As to Barrington, whose chambers were in King's Bench Walks, Lamb has a curious anecdote. He walked "burly and square," in imitation of Coventry ; " howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype." He was well backed, and rose to the Treasurership in 1785. When we remember his pretensions as a naturalist, it is odd to read of him that, when the accounts of his year came to be audited, the following charge was unanimously dis- allowed by the bench : " Item, disbursed Mr. The Inner Temple 115 Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." Barrington died in 1 800, and was buried in the Temple Church, where his monument existed till the " restoration." He wrote, among other things, an essay in the Archceologia (vol. ix.) on the arms of the two societies of the Inner and Middle Temple, which does not add much to our knowledge. Maseres was a Baron of the Exchequer, and a voluminous writer on mathematics as well as law. Lamb, of course, only deals with his outward appearance. " Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George II., closes my imperfect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple." He died in 1824. Lord Ellenborough and Lord Redesdale were Treasurers in 1795 and 1796. The first, who was called as Edward Law, at Lincoln's Inn in 1780, moved on to the Temple, where he was called in 1783. He went through the regular stages of promotion, until he was appointed Lord Chief Justice and created a peer in i 802. Mitford was Chancellor of Ireland when he was called to the House of Lords. His son was advanced to an earldom in 1877, when he was Chairman of Committees in the House; but dying in 1887, his honours became extinct. Of humorous anecdotes of either father or son there seem to be none, 1 1 6 The Inns of Court while those about Ellenborough would fill a book. Mr. Jeaffreson naturally mentions him many times ; yet, with all his sense of humour, he was deeply offended because Matthews mimicked him on the stage. As leading counsel for Warren Hastings he had plenty of scope for his sarcastic humour. He was particularly clever in turning fine language and metaphor into ridicule, and must have been a thorn in the flesh to Burke and Sheridan. To the surgeon as a witness, who was asked his profession, and answered, " I employ myself as a surgeon," Law put the question, " Does any one else employ you ? " This is very elementary wit, and in his later years Ellenborough degenerated into a mere punster. The next Treasurer of note was Joseph Jekyll, in 1 8 1 6, a joker of the first order, but who never rose higher at the bar than to be a Master in Chancery. Like Ellenborough, he belonged to Lincoln's Inn as well as the Temple. He was descended from Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls in and after 1717, who was also celebrated for his wit. Of the younger Jekyll, as compared with Sydney Smith, a third wit I forget who remarked, " When you have been with Jekyll you remember what good things he said ; when you have been with Smith you remember how much you laughed." Mirth is said to keep men young, and Jekyll was no exception, for he lived The Inner Temple 117 to be eighty-five and senior bencher, as well as senior King's Counsel. Scarlett was the next Treasurer of much note. He attained the office in 1824, was made a Baron of the Exchequer in 1834, and created a peer, as Lord Abinger, in the following year. Bickersteth, Treasurer in 1836, had already been made Lord Langdale. As Master of the Rolls he deserves well of posterity by his efforts for the preservation and publication of ancient records." After this we come too near our own time to be able to say much. Thesiger, who began life in the Royal Navy, like Erskine, was Treasurer in 1843. He had been at Copenhagen in 1807, on board H.M.S. Cambrian, as a midshipman. He had an uncle of the same name who was a captain in the Russian Navy, but died unmarried. The future Lord Chancellor entered himself at Gray's Inn when he was four-and-twenty, but six years later, in 1824, was "called" at the Inner Temple. Ten years later, in 1834, he "took silk," and soon after entered Parliament, where his abilities and his many pleasing social qualities soon made him favourably known. He had a great share in several famous peerage cases, and especially in that protracted and difficult trial which ensued on the claim of Lord Talbot to the ancient earldom of Shrewsbury. Not only an historic title, but some .40,000 a n8 The Inns of Court year was said to depend on the decision of the House of Lords. I well remember being present in the House on one of the days of the hearing. The commanding figure of Sir Frederic Thesiger, the sweetness and power of his voice, his extra- ordinary grasp of complicated genealogical details, and the romantic interest he contrived to impart to them, made an abiding impression on my youthful mind. That, I think, was in 1857. In the June of the following year Lord Talbot took his seat as Earl of Shrewsbury, and during the same year his successful advocate gained the highest prize of his profession, and became Lord Chancellor by the title of Baron Chelmsford. Here, perhaps, these notices of benchers may be brought to a conclusion ; but I should mention Sir William Follett, who died in 1845 at the height of a successful career, and was buried in the Temple Church ; Sir Cresswell Cresswell, whose original sur- name was Easterby, who belonged to both Temples, and became first judge of the Divorce Court in 1858; Stephen Lushington, Treasurer in 1851, and Dean of Arches ; that strange genius, Samuel Warren, author of Ten Thousand a Year, Treasurer in 1866 ; and the genial Henry Alworth Merewether, Treasurer in 1868, whose knowledge of municipal law was only equalled by his pleasant wit. The name of Lord Lyndhurst, who lived in Fig-tree Court as Sir John Singleton Copley, does not figure in the list of benchers. I remember seeing the brass railing beside his seat in the House of Lords, on which, when he grew very old, he could lean as he addressed the House. He died in 1863, upwards of ninety years of age. The Inner Temple Hall contains a series of interesting portraits and pictures, some of them fine as paintings. King William, Queen Mary, and Queen Anne figure at full length. The portrait supposed to represent Lyttleton is pro- bably apocryphal, but the whole-length of Coke may be genuine. In the same hall or adjoining " Parliament Chamber " are portraits of George II. and Queen Caroline, and of Sir Thomas Twysden, who is represented in a small whole-length picture seated at a table. Lord Chancellor Finch, Earl of Nottingham, and Richard West, who was Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1725, when he was only thirty-four, are also represented ; and Thurlow, in the well-known picture by Phillips, which was engraved by Turner. One recalls Macaulay's sen- tence about him in narrating the conclusion of the trial of Warren Hastings, over the commence- ment of which he had presided as Chancellor : how, estranged from all his old allies, " he sat scowling among the junior barons." There is a head, said to represent Selden, and there are two 120 The Inns of Court interesting views, painted in oil. One of them has been ascribed to William Hogarth. It repre- sents the Middle Temple Hall, "with its entrance tower in its ancient state," says a writer in the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (ii. 69), who visited the Temple in 1860, "and a square wooden bell-turret above. Eight single figures are walking in the court." Of the other view, the same writer, probably the late Thomas Hugo, says it shows the King's Bench Walks, the open square of the Temple, as seen from Mitre Court, the entrance from the north ; having on the right hand the old Paper Buildings, which were burned down in 1838 the same of which Lamb quoted the line, " Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight ; "- and toward the south, a low building formerly used for the King's Bench Office, with the garden, the Thames, and, far beyond, the Surrey hills. The picture is ascribed to Joseph Nicholls, or to his namesake, Sutton Nicholls, who published a volume of London views. Many of the old buildings as shown in this view have long disappeared, but King's Bench Walks, or the eastern row of them, are much as they were when it was made, and when Gibber parodied Pope's couplet on Murray, afterwards Earl of Mansfield, 121 " Graced as thou art with all the power of words, So known, so honoured at the House of Lords," by writing " Persuasion tips his tongue whene'er he talks, And he has chambers in the King's Bench Walks." Both verses and parody were written about 1720. There is nothing else of much interest in the hall, but the new stained glass might be worse. The east end of the hall has two doors, whose opening is concealed in the panelling. They lead to the Parliament Chamber, and might have been made an architectural feature. Above them are many portraits, and in the arched space at the top a painting of Pegasus surrounded by nymphs of various degrees of nudity, supposed to be muses. Murray's residence in the Temple was at 5 King's Bench Walks, though he belonged to Lincoln's Inn. There is a second reference to the place, and to Murray's residence in it, in Pope's Imitations of Horace (Book IV., Ode i), an address to Venus : " Ah, sound no more thy soft alarms, Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms ; To number five direct your doves, There spread round Murray all your blooming loves." Naturally, Pope was a poet whom such another poet as Samuel Rogers would either admire or hate. 122 The Inns of Court That he admired him is evident from some passages in Mackay's Recollections, and it is certainly in- teresting to think that we can still, as Rogers said, " tread over the very steps where the feet of Pope had passed." At Number 3 in the same row, Oliver Goldsmith was living in 1765 ; and two very different people, Samuel Lysons, the first and best of county topographers, and Joseph Jekyll, mentioned in the last chapter, had their chambers at Number 6. Selden's own lodgings were in Paper Buildings, but his great library, after his death in 1654, was stored by his executors in chambers in King's Bench Walks. The books were offered to the benchers for the Inner Temple Library, but, when five years had elapsed and no arrangements had been made for their reception, the trustees very wisely sent them to Bodley's library at Oxford, to which they formed a very welcome addition. Two very eminent men had chambers in Paper Buildings when they were burnt in 1838, namely, Campbell, afterwards Chancellor, and the eccentric Sir John Maule, whose sayings as a judge are still quoted. The fire, in fact, broke out in Maule's room. " He had gone to bed," says Campbell, "leaving a candle burning by the bedside," and both lost everything in the general conflagration furniture, books, briefs, and many other documents I2 3 of value. In Paper Buildings, also, two other great men, neither of them as lawyers, resided for a short time, namely, George Canning in 1792, and Samuel Rogers before he removed to St. James's Place. After the disastrous fire in 1838, a new range, not to be characterised by any architectural terms with which I am acquainted, were erected in their place. They are by Smirke, who called the style Elizabethan. Lamb mentions an old relic, a sun- dial, and tacks to his mention some singularly inappropriate remarks, though suitable for other sundials. He calls it an altar-like structure, and praises its " silent heart language," but the original motto ran thus : " Begone about your business." Brayley mentions it distinctly, and if it is not possible to admire its sentiment, or the relevancy of Lamb's remarks on its "silent heart language," at least we may commend its cogency. It is said that the Treasurer, under whom it was set up, was asked by his workman for a motto, and thinking the man was making game of him replied as above, and the man took him at his word. The old sundial has been succeeded by one which, in all probability, is still older. The cele- brated blackamoor of Clement's Inn has been brought to the Inner Temple garden. How Lamb would have moralised over him no one can now 1 24 7^/ie Inns of Court say. Perhaps the time-honoured epigram would have sufficed to him : " 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." There were several of these leaden statues at one time in London, and that they were capable of being really fine is made evident by such an example as the statue of Venus at Knole, which was probably, with this blackamoor and others, made at a " Statuary's " in Piccadilly, the Euston Road of a hundred and fifty years ago. The material is quite as good for our London climate as bronze, and I wonder we do not see some revival of what seems now to be a lost art. Mr. Blomfield has much to say about leaden figures in his delightful Formal Garden in England (chap, viii.), but does not mention the " sable son of woe " in the Temple. The revels of the two Temples may, perhaps, be better noticed when we come to Middle Temple Hall. But it should be mentioned here that the last of these festivities took place in the old Inner Temple Hall in 1733, and a description of it, quoted The Inner Temple 125 by Mr. Wheatley from Wynne's Euonomus, shows that the fireplace was in the centre, as in old days at Westminster, and still, I believe, at Penshurst. While wood was the principal fuel, this custom must have been almost universal. Two ancient fireplaces in walls have been found in the Tower, but not, I believe, any corresponding chimney or other out- let for the smoke. One of the oldest fireplaces in a wall is that of Crosby Hall, which dates from about 1470. Wynne says the Master of the Revels conducted the Chancellor and one of the Judges " round about the coal fire three times. The fire, however," he tells us, " was not lighted, though it was the month of February." The Prince of Wales (Frederick) honoured the performance with his company part of the time : " he came into the music- gallery wing about the middle of the play, and went away as soon as the farce of walking round the coal fire was over." It may be worth while here to note that students who have kept the requisite number of terms are " called to the bar." These calls are made on the sixteenth day of each term, advantages being given to members of a University. A student when called becomes an "utter barrister," and after twelve years in that degree becomes eligible as a reader or bencher. The usages differ but slightly in the different Inns of Court. At call, pass and honour certificates are 126 The Inns of Court given, and those students who take honours assume seniority over those who have only passed. In 1875, a code of rules, to which all the Inns sub- scribed, known as the " Consolidated Regulations," were issued, and are still in force. VI THE MIDDLE TEMPLE Beauty of the Two Temples The Literary Associations of the Middle Temple The Fire of 1679 The Gate Brick Court Oliver Goldsmith His Funeral His Grave The Fountain Described by Dickens Lines by " L. E. L." SOME profane person has compared the Middle Temple to a beautiful woman with a plain husband. But the Inner Temple has its own beauty, some of it of a very substantial character. The real " Queen Anne " style can be studied there at great ease. Some nooks and corners are distinctly picturesque, and the charming view across the lawn to the embankment and the Thames even though the Surrey hills of Charles Lamb's description are seldom, if ever, visible now has been enhanced in the foreground by the addition of our old friend from Clement's Inn, the blackamoor. Granting all this, and not forgetting the perfect 128 The Inns of Court model of a gentleman's town house offered us by Wren in the Master's lodge for though it is on territory common to both Inns, like the chapel, it is geographically in the Inner Temple still we are forced to confess that there is superior beauty, greater grace, better grouping in the Middle Temple. 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. I am not satisfied with the library, yet it has its good points, and was immensely admired as an example of the revived Gothic style, and by none more than myself, when it was first built. A little sense of the necessity for proportion even in Gothic buildings robs it of much of its exterior charm, but the interior goes far to redeem it. The new garden buildings have no such redeeming features, nor have Harcourt Buildings ; but perhaps they set off the rest. The courts by which we enter from the north-west are among the best features, and when we pass through an old wrought-iron gate, and, turning southward in an ancient and spacious court, see before us the fountain, the hall, the terrace, the green slope, and the em- bankment and river beyond the library, we feel that so far the charm of the place is as complete as ever. So much for beauty ; the literary and historical associations of the Middle Temple, it must be allowed, are chiefly of an imported character. The K The Middle Temple 131 lawyers are not so much to us as some other people. We think of the King-maker and his puppets, of Shakespeare, of Goldsmith, of Johnson, of Porson, of Dickens ; and not so much of Blackstone, Clarendon, Somers, Dunning, or Talfourd. Of course, some great men, men great apart from their legal qualifi- cations, were lawyers, and " of the Middle Temple.". Fielding, the novelist, was a barrister of this Inn. His chambers were in Pump Court. We cannot be sure that Sir Walter Raleigh was a lawyer, but he described himself about 1570 to be "of the Middle Temple." Another great righting man was a student here for some time, Sir Henry Havelock. His name among the Templars comes upon us unexpectedly. Yet he was a pupil of Chitty's before he went to India. Elias Ashmole, the antiquary, made no figure as a lawyer, yet he was called in 1660. He had chambers in Middle Temple Lane, and there in January 1679 his books and papers, coins and medals, were destroyed by fire. This fire was far more destructive to the Temple than the -Great Fire of twelve years before. If any of the residential part of the ancient buildings remained, they were now destroyed, together with the Cloisters. It broke out at midnight in Pump Court, and raged for twelve hours. The weather was cold, the Thames frozen, and the water supply inadequate. It is eaid that the barrels of ale from 132 The Inns of Court the butteries were put into the pumping engines, a story which may have originated from the burning of part of the Inner Temple Hall, when, no doubt, the beer-cellar would be consumed. The flames were finally subdued by the use of gunpowder. The chapel was saved, as well as Middle Temple Hall, but in addition to Pump Court, Elm Tree Court, and Vine Court, a part of Brick Court was also destroyed. Notwithstanding this calamity, the Middle Temple presents some old features wanting in the other Inn. Apart from the church, already described, which has few visible signs of antiquity left, some of the courts rebuilt after 1679 are now old enough to have grown picturesque, while the massive, well-proportioned entrance gateway from Fleet Street (of which a sketch appeared in our first chapter) was designed by the great Sir Christopher himself, and built in 1684. It replaced a Tudor gateway, which Aubrey tells us was set up by Sir Amias Pawlet, who appears both to have designed and also built it, at his own expense, in payment of a fine laid upon him by Wolsey. It was decorated with the Cardinal's arms, and Pawlet's own shone in the window glass ; but the stonework was so mouldering that the whole edifice had to be taken down. " [Once we are within the gate, the curious old buildings, assuredly much older in parts than 1684, The Middle Temple 135 will strike the visitor who enters after the newness and bustle of Fleet Street. The slope is steep, and leads down, through another and very different build- ing, to that part of the Temple Garden which owes its existence to the Thames Embankment. A picturesque gateway here, even a plain but well- proportioned one, like Wren's at the top, would have been a conspicuous ornament to the neighbourhood. The first corner we come to is that of Brick Court, which is open to the lane on the eastern side. It is said to have been built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to have been the first part of the Temple made of brick, and to be alluded to by Spenser in the Prothalamion, where he speaks of the " bricky towers." But the court is sacred to the memory of a greater than Spenser. It was in No. 2 that Oliver Goldsmith breathed his last, in April 1774. His rooms were immediately over those of Sir William Blackstone, who, engaged on his Com- mentaries, is said to have complained of the constant racket above. Goldsmith had first lived in Garden Court, but the house next door to No. 3, which still exists, has been pulled down. It was before he went to the Temple, and while he was still at Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, in 1763, that Johnson writes of him : " I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power 136 The Inns of Court to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got 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 by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merits ; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high voice for having used him so ill." In Wine Office Court he wrote the Vicar of Wakefield, and removed thence to 2 Garden Court in 1764. We next meet with him in Gray's Inn, but his comedy, The Good-natured Man, bringing him in .500, he bought the chambers at No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple, for ^400, and remained here till his death in 1774, or about nine years, varied by summers at Canonbury and near the six- mile stone on the Edgeware Road, where he lodged at a farmhouse on the western side of the road, and where he wrote SJie Stoops to Conquer. The Deserted Village and the* Traveller were mainly written in 2 Brick Court. Thackeray, in his English Humourists, alludes to his own residence in that house in 1855: "I have been many a time Earn *W * The Middle Temple 139 in the chambers in the Temple which were his, and passed up the staircase which Johnson, and 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." In a letter to Forster, Thackeray says the bed- room was a mere closet without any light in it, and also remarks on some good carved woodwork being in the chambers. Mr. Wheatley says they were on the right hand of the visitor ascending the stairs. The windows look out on the Temple Garden, and in Goldsmith's time there was a rookery here, which he describes in his Animated Nature. Mr. Laurence Hutton quotes Washington Irving's account of Goldsmith's death. Burke, on hearing the news, burst into tears. Reynolds threw away his pencil for the day. Johnson felt the blow deeply, and wrote of it to Boswell that Sir Joshua thought he owed about .2000, adding, " Was ever poet so trusted before ? " The funeral took place on the 9th of April, at five in the afternoon, and they buried poor Goldsmith near where he had died. A little corner only of the old Temple cemetery remains on the north side of the church. To this corner, or somewhere near it, his body was borne through 140 The Inns of Court a crowd of all ranks and both sexes the friends whom he had delighted with his wit, and the poor on whom he had spent his scanty substance. Yet the place of his grave was forgotten, and when, eighty-six years later, they sought it, no stone had been left to mark it As if the satire in one of his own papers in the Citizen of the World had been acted on seriously, they took no care that he should be commemorated where they laid him. His Chinaman writes of the epitaphs of the English : " When we read those monumental histories of the dead, it may be justly said that ' all men are equal in the dust ' ; for they all appear equally remarkable for being the most sincere Christians, the most benevolent neighbours, and the honestest men of their time." A little farther on in the same paper he adds : " Some even make epitaphs for themselves, and bespeak the reader's good-will. It were indeed to be wished that every man would early learn in this manner to make his own ; that he would draw it up in terms as flattering as possible, and that he would make it the employment of his whole life to deserve it" While Goldsmith's grave in the Temple was forgotten, Johnson and his friends had arranged for a tablet in the Poets' Corner, and there, accordingly, we see Nollekens' medallion of him, i/il ->' If a* *h If I iff" f :l . i|r: ij.< , The Middle Temple 143 and Johnson's famous epitaph, " Qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," 1 words frequently and in vain sought for among the classics. This monument was put up in 1776, when Goldsmith had been dead a little more than two years, and gave occasion for the famous round-robin of remonstrance from those who thought the epitaph should have been in English. In 1 860, after a fruitless inquiry as to where Goldsmith had been buried, a plain grave-stone was placed in the little plot of ground which successive " restorations " had left to represent the cemetery of the Temple, and on it are only the words, " Here lies Oliver Goldsmith." He made in his writings but passing allusions, few in number, to the Temple, and the Temple, in return, neglected him and his grave. Leaving Brick Court, and continuing down Middle Temple Lane, we arrive, opposite the hall, at a wide paved platform "or terrace; beyond or to westward of the terrace is the fountain not the same fountain as that of which Lamb wrote so amusingly, but a new one, a provokingly new one, with a terra-cotta bird in the centre. To the right some steps lead up to New Court and 1 ' ' Who left untouched scarcely any kind of literature, and touched none that he did not adorn.' 144 The Inns of Court Devereux Court, and on the left there are steps down to the gardens and the library. There are shady trees overhead, but Goldsmith's rooks no longer caw in them. Altogether, this seems to be the most pleasing part of the Temple the part most often alluded to by essayists and novelists. No one can forget what use Dickens made of it in Martin Chuzzlewit. Here John Westlock met Ruth Pinch : " Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees plunged lightly down to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion came towards it." In another place (chapter xlv.) there is a fuller description of the fountain : " There was a little plot between them, that Tom should always come out of the Temple by one way ; and that was past the fountain. Coming through Fountain Court he was just to glance down the steps leading to Garden Court and to look once all round him, and if Ruth had come to meet him, there he would see her not sauntering, you understand (on account of the clerks), but coming briskly up, with the best little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the fountain and beat it all to nothing. For, fifty to one, Tom had been looking for her in the wrong direction, and had quite given her up. . . . Whether there was life enough left in the slow vegetation of Fountain Court for the smoky shrubs to have any consciousness of the brightest and purest- hearted little woman in the world is a question for gardeners The Middle Temple 145 and those who are learned in the loves of plants. But that it was a good thing for fhat same paved yard to have such a delicate little figure flitting through it ; that it passed like a smile from the grimy old houses and the worn flag-stones, and left them duller, darker, sterner than before there is no sort of doubt. The Temple fountain might have leaped up 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 bene- dictions 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." There is much more to the same effect, for Dickens loved this little oasis, and dwelt affection- ately on its beauty. There are some lines by " L. E. L." on the fountain, which, though entirely of the " Annual " type, are not without a certain sweetness. The last four lines are the best : " Away in the distance is heard the vast sound From the streets of the city that compass it round, Like the echo of fountains or ocean's deep call, Yet the fountain's low singing is heard over all." VII THE MIDDLE TEMPLE (Concluded} The Hall Manningham's Diary Shakespeare's Twelfth Night The Revels The Moots The Masques The Rival Roses Edmund Burke The Library The Garden The Dials Great Lawyers The Norths Jeffreys Blackstone Eldon. IN the south side of the pavement of Fountain Court is the famous old Hall. It was built in 1572, when Plowden was Treasurer. It is a hundred feet long, forty-two feet wide, and forty- seven feet high, and the proportions are admirably suited to give a feeling of space and lightness. Mr. Wheatley considers the roof, with its hammer-beams, " the best Elizabethan roof in London." The screen is also very rich and handsome, and is always, but erroneously, said to have been made of spoils taken from the Spanish Armada ; but the records of the Middle Temple show that it was made at least thirteen years before the Armada was defeated. There are many interest- The Middle Temple 149 ing associations about Middle Temple Hall, but the most interesting is that which connects it with Shakespeare. In 1597 a student called John Man- ningham was entered on the books of this Inn. For two years, from 1601 to 1603, he kept a brief diary, which is preserved among the Harleian manu- scripts in the British Museum (No. 5353). Until it was discovered, in 1828, that it contained a notice of the performance of Twelfth Night in 1602, the date usually assigned to that play was 1614. The diarist says, on 2nd February: "At our feast wee had a play called ' Twelve Night or what you will," much like the ' Comedy of Errors,' or ' Menechmi ' in Plautus ; but most like and neere to that in Italian called ' Inganni.' " There cannot be any kind of doubt that Shakespeare's play is referred to in this entry. Manningham goes on to describe the plot : " A good practice in it to make the steward believe his lady widdowe was in love with him by counter- fayting a letter, as from his lady, in general termes telling him what shee liked best in him, and pre- scribing his gestures, inscribing his apparaile, etc., and then when he came to practice, making beleeve they tooke him to be mad." Charles Knight, as an enthusiastic Shakespearian scholar, waxes almost eloquent over this passage. In the supplementary notice to the play in his " pictorial " edition he writes: " There is something to our minds very precious in that memorial." The fact is, as he very well knew, our sources of information as to Shakespeare are of the rarest and vaguest character. " What a scene," he exclaims, " do these few plain words call up before us ! The Christmas festivities have lingered on till Candlemass. The Lord of Misrule has resigned his sceptre ; the fox and the cat have been hunted round the hall ; the Masters of the Revels have sung their songs ; the drums are silent which lent their noisy chorus to the Marshal's proclamations ; and Sir Francis Flatterer and Sir Randle Rackabite have passed into the ranks of ordinary men." At this point Knight refers in a footnote to Dugdale's Origines Juridiciales, or, as he spells it one of the few misprints in this careful book " Judiciales." Dugdale describes what he calls the solemn revels on " All-Hallown Day and on the feast day of the Purification of our Lady," and mentions the fines imposed on those who failed to attend and on those who refused to " carry up wafers " to the Auncients' table. " When the last measure is dancing, the Reader at the Cupboard calls to one of the Gentle- men of the Bar, as he is walking or dancing with the rest, to give the Judges a song : who forthwith begins the first line of any Psalm, as he thinks fittest ; after which all the company follow and sing with him." Dugdale gives a full but tedious account of the ensuing ceremonies : of the selection of a I . : , . i r v ak i The Middle Temple 153 competent number of utter barristers who accompany the Reader to the buttery, of the towels with wafers in them, of the wooden bowls filled with " Ipocras," of the " low solemn congee ; " and so on until the judges depart, escorted to " the Court Gate, where they take their leaves of them." After this description there is a passage which shows us where Shakespeare's play would come in : " Besides these solemn Revels or measures aforesaid, they had wont to be entertained with Post Revels, performed by the better sort of the young Gentlemen of the Society with Galliards, Corrantoes, and other dances ; or else with Stage playes : the first of these feasts being at the beginning, and the other at the later end of Christmas. But of late years these post Revells have been disused, both here and in the other Innes of Court." Dugdale's Origines was published in 1671. In Shakespeare's time, no doubt, these post revels went merrily on. " After the dinner," says Knight, " a play ; and that play Shakspere's ' Twelfth Night.' And the actual roof under which the happy company of benchers and barristers and students first listened to that joyous and exhilarating play, full of the truest and most beautiful humanities, especially fitted for a season of cordial mirthfulness, is still standing ; and we may walk into that stately hall and think, Here Shakspere's 'Twelfth Night' was acted in the Christmas of 1601 ; and here its exquisite poetry first fell upon the ear of some secluded scholar, and was to him as a fragrant flower blooming amidst the arid sands of his Bracton and his Fleta ; and here its gentle satire upon the vain and the foolish penetrated into the 154 The Inns of Court natural heart of some grave and formal dispenser of justice, and made him look with tolerance, if not with sympathy, upon the mistakes of less grave and formal fellow-men ; and here its ever-gushing spirit of enjoyment of fun without malice, of wit without grossness, of humour without extravagance taught the swaggering, roaring, overgrown boy, miscalled student, that there were higher sources of mirth than affrays in Fleet Street, or drunkenness in Whitefriars." Next Knight apostrophises the Hall in some, if possible, still taller English : " Venerable Hall of the Middle Temple, thou art to our eyes more stately and more to be admired since we looked upon that entry in the Table-book of John Manningham." It is sometimes assumed too rashly that Shakespeare himself acted in the play, but it is much more likely that it was acted by the " young gentlemen " of whom Dugdale speaks. Mr. Wheatley quotes Sir Simonds d'Ewes as to the " moots " sometimes held in this hall : " On Thursday, the loth day of July, 1623, after our supper in the Middle Temple Hall ended, with another utter barrister I argued a moot at the bench to the great satisfaction of such as heard me. Two gentlemen under the bar arguing in law French, bareheaded, as I did myself before I was called to the bar at the cupboard." From an architectural point of view, the Hall of the Middle Temple is a building of great interest. It is, I think, Mr. Gotch who has pointed out the survival of the old Gothic in the windows, after every The Middle Temple 155 other detail had become Italian. There are numerous examples at Oxford of this fact, and there, indeed, the Gothic tradition lived on through two generations. But if we look critically at the interior of the Middle Temple Hall we perceive excluding a certain intrusion of modern details by a " restorer " that everything belongs to the renascence period, every- thing is strictly Elizabethan except the windows. Plowden was Treasurer in 1572, and, so far as an architect or, to use the Shakespearian phrase, a surveyor was employed, he had orders to do the best he could, gathering the best masons, the best carvers in stone and wood, and, above all, the best glaziers. It will be remembered that in 1572 window glass was still expensive, and only to be had in small pieces. The designer of the hall was at the mercy of the glaziers, and they were at the mercy of the makers of glass. Their traditions were all Gothic, like their glass ; so it comes to pass that we have the delightful incongruity which helps so much to make the picturesqueness of the hall. The windows are but slightly pointed, it is true, but the point is in each panel of the lead-work, whereas in the wooden roof there is not only no point, but a pendent from the apex of the arch like a keystone. The modern stained glass is of the wrong kind of incongruity. It should have been of the kind, so rare in England, which we see in the cathedral of Brussels or the 156 The Inns of Co^trt church of Gouda ; but, instead, it has been made to look as if it belonged to the time of Edward IV. or earlier still, and it is, therefore, or purports to be, about a hundred years older than the fabric in which it is placed. This is an anachronism of a kind very common of late. For instance, in a church of the latest Perpendicular style, known to have been built in 1509, an eminent architect has placed thirteenth- century, or what he thought to be thirteenth-century fittings, and has lined the chancel with tiles of the same character, so that Lyneham Church enjoys the distinction of having been furnished and decorated three hundred years before it was built ! A very similar anomaly, but not quite so flagrant, may be seen at Trumpington Church, near Cambridge. We can imagine how successive " restorers " must have longed for leave to attack the Middle Temple screen, which, in spite of its being in front of a Gothic window filled with mediaeval glass, is aggressively rich in a style of Elizabethan so advanced as to be almost Palladian. The engaged Tuscan columns in the lower part are very late in style, but the upper part shows the true date, 1574. The heraldry in the hall is very interesting, much of it apparently being of the same date as the building. The oldest shields are in the two bay windows which flank the daTs, and especially in that towards the south, where one is said to date back to GATEWAY TO MIDDLE TEMPLE. The Middle Temple 159 1 5 40, and may have been removed from an older hall. The side windows are also full of heraldry. The arms of the Prince of Wales are in the middle window on the south side, and next to them those of the lamented Duke of Clarence, who, like his father, was a bencher of the Middle Temple. Under the windows are many shields of " readers," some of the best families in England being represented, and some very odd heraldry. One uxorious reader introduces his wife's arms with his own. Of the shields two or three are blank, out of more than three hundred. This means that the reader, having no arms, would not take out a grant. The first example of this exhibition of temper and taste was set by Mr. Charles Austin, in 1 847 ; but it was imitated as lately as 1871. I wonder Thackeray did not embalm Austin among the interesting specimens described in his Book of Snobs. The earliest of this series is the coat of Richard Swaine, J 597- The hall used to contain busts, in imitation of bronze, of the twelve Caesars. They have been " restored " away, and some armour replaces them. There are several interesting portraits, chiefly of royal personages, including a bust of the Prince of Wales. In 1635, while the Elector Palatine was in London, a master of the revels, who bore the suggestive title of Prince d Amours, gave a masque, 160 The Inns of Court which was attended by Queen Henrietta Maria. The Middle Templars had joined heartily in the grand masque which took place in 1633, but an account of it belongs strictly to Gray's Inn, from which the procession of which Sir Francis Bacon, of that Inn, is said to have been the chief contriver set out on its way to the Thames and Whitehall. I do not know who Sir Francis Bacon was. The great "Viscount St. Alban " died in 1626, so that there is probably a misprint in the account. The Masque of Flowers, a seventeenth - century pageant, was revived in Gray's Inn in 1887, and was also played in the hall of the Inner Temple, but not in the Middle Temple, in the summer of last year. There are several references to the Temple in Shakespeare's plays. He in particular mentions a meeting in the Temple between Richard, Duke of York, the father of Edward IV. and Richard III., and the Earls of Somerset, Suffolk, and Warwick, when adjourning to the garden, as Suffolk sug- gested : " Within the Temple hall we were too loud ; The garden here is more convenient." This scene must be placed in the year 1430, or near it. The " Plantagenet " of Shakespeare had been Duke of York for some fifteen years then. Somerset was Sir John Beaufort, K.G., who had The Middle Temple 161 succeeded to the earldom in 1418, and became a duke in 1443. Suffolk was Sir William de la Pole, also a Knight of the Garter, who had succeeded his brother in 1415, and was advanced to a dukedom in 1448. Warwick, the celebrated "king-maker," was Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury by descent, and of Warwick by creation after his marriage with the heiress of the Beauchamps. We can picture the four great nobles in their gay dresses stepping down into the green slopes of the garden, wearing perhaps great wide-brimmed hats such as Van Eyck has immortalised, or soft silken kerchiefs of some gorgeous colour, with dark purple or green or crimson gowns. York is little but handsome, and, for his size, compact and wiry. Of Warwick's appear- ance, we learn from one of Mr. Doyle's quotations that he was active and spirited, tall and strong, brave and handsome. Of Somerset's appearance we know little ; of Suffolk's, nothing. Somerset and Suffolk side together ; Warwick takes part with York, who has plucked a white rose. Warwick says : " I love no colours, and without all colour Of base insinuating flattery I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet." By " colours " Warwick means deceits or double dealing. We still speak of " a colourable pretext." Somerset chooses a red rose, and Suffolk follows him : M [62 The Inns of Court " I pluck this red rose with young Somerset." As to how far this scene is real, and as to the exact meaning of the roses which gave their names to the many years of war which ensued, it is not possible to be sure. Roses were already a common heraldic badge, and had appeared on the monument of Edmund Crouchback in Westminster Abbey. There is a tradition that they were first grown close to the Temple in the gardens of the Earls and Dukes of Lancaster at the Savoy ; but so far as we can now ascertain, the old, single, white or pink " dog rose " was the only one known, and it may well have been indigenous. In a manuscript illuminated in northern France towards the end of the fifteenth century, and full of pictures of garden flowers, only single roses are represented. Edmund Burke was of the " Middle Temple," and lived at the " Pope's Head," over the shop of Jacob Robinson, bookseller and publisher, just within the Inner Temple Gateway. He left the Temple in 1756 on his marriage, and went to live in Wimpole Street. . He attained a small local fame as a debater while he was at Robinson's, for he used to air his eloquence at a club held in Essex Street in the Robin Hood Tavern, which has long disappeared. There are no memories of Thomas Moore in the Middle Temple, except that he entered his name as a student in 1799, but he ftrde ^ lacks The Middle Temple 165 did not live within the lawyers' precincts. Neither did Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was entered as a student in 1772. Among Middle Templars of minor literary eminence may be enumerated Sir John Davies, one of the poetical stars of the spacious times of great Elizabeth ; Sir Thomas Overbury, whose tragical death by poison in the Tower made such a stir ; John Ford, the dramatist ; Wycherley, Shadwell, and Congreve ; and Elias Ashmole, the antiquary. At the foot of the slope south of the hall and the fountain is the new Library. It is in a Gothic a very Gothic style, and was designed by H. R. Abraham. The Prince of Wales, who was called to the bar and admitted a bencher of Middle Temple, opened it on the same day, namely, 3ist October 1 86 1. There arc two storeys of offices and chambers underneath the storey in which the library itself is situated. This makes the building look so much out of proportion, that when a visitor ascends the very picturesque outside staircase to the door and enters, he is surprised at the beauty of a really fine apartment, eighty-six feet long, with an open hammer-beam roof, imitated rather closely from that of Westminster Hall. The roof is sixty-three feet to the apex, and the whole library is forty-two feet in width, the appearance of which is of course diminished by the lining i66 The Inns of Court of cupboards and bookcases. There is a fine oriel projecting ten feet at the upper end, and many other windows decorated with heraldic glass in a good style. Herbert, writing at the beginning of this century, says there are many valuable manu- scripts. I have not been accorded permission to see them. The library is said to be in part outside the strict limits of the Middle Temple ; but the successive embankments which have taken place here have added considerably to the narrow limits of the last century. To judge adequately of the exterior of the new library, the visitor should not confine himself to the view from the fountain terrace, but should proceed by a narrow passage, from which he can emerge on the south side and look back up the hill. On his left is the curious old arch, which appears in some very old views as the water-gate of Essex House. This now leads up a stairway to Essex Street. The green gardens stretch away to the right ; two prominent buildings, before the eye reaches the city, crowned by St. Paul's, being the new Sion College and the City of London School. On a fine day this view up or down the river is very striking. It is marred, no doubt, here and there by ugly and ill-proportioned buildings, but no view in London is without this defect. The Temple Gardens are well known for the chrysanthemum shows held annually at the close The Middle Temple 169 of the Long Vacation. The two societies are supposed to be in rivalry in these exhibitions, and there are two separate tents or sheds ; but they are close together, at the same corner of the gardens, near the Embankment, so that they are very accessible, and are largely visited while they remain open. The gardens in the summer months are full of children. I never pass a small family there without a thought of Charles Lamb, who sported on the same spot as a child and played tricks with the mechanism of the old fountain. There are still two or three old sun-dials left. One is opposite the hall and bears the motto, " Pereunt et imputantur." In Brick Court there is another with this motto, " Time and tide tarry for no man." The dial in Pump Court is occasion- ally painted up. It bears an inscription in two lines in old-fashioned letters : " Shadows we are and Like shadows depart." The saddest of these mottoes is, or was, in Essex Court : " Vestigia nulla retrorsum." Its appropriateness to one of the most frequented entrances of the lawyers' domain may be doubted, unless it is intended as a warning to those who would rashly go to law : " The downhill path is easy, but there's no turning back." 1 70 The Inns of Court The Middle Temple has not been so fruitful in great lawyers as its companion Inn. There are many reasons for this fact, and we must remember that it only contains thirty-three separate houses, as compared with forty-two in the Inner Temple. Another reason is, perhaps, that many students used to come here annually from Ireland and from India, men who came in order " to eat their dinners," and go on to practise elsewhere. It was rare to meet an Irish barrister who had read in the Inner Temple. Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple absorbed them nearly all. Still, the number of great lawyers is sufficient to afford much that is of interest to the general reader, and the Inn of the Norths, Plowden, Lord Chancellor Clarendon, Lord Chancellor Somers, Lord Chancellor Cowper, Sir William Blackstone, Lord Chancellor Eldon, his brother Lord Stowell, Lord Ashburton, and Judge Talfourd, can show a goodly list of celebrities, to say nothing of the Prince of Wales and, until the I4th of January last, the Duke of Clarence, his eldest son, whose loss has been an occasion of such general mourning. The North family need hardly be mentioned here, the celebrated Lives being so well known. Francis North, second son of Dudley, fourth Lord North, was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in June 1 66 1, became a bencher in 1668, was reader in The Middle Temple 171 1671, and was made Lord Guilford in 1683. Roger North, his younger brother, describes him as of low stature, but of an amiable, ingenuous aspect. He died two years after attaining the peerage. His grandson succeeded a cousin in the old barony of North, and became the first Earl of Guilford. The well-known Miss Marianne North, whose drawings of tropical flowers form such an attraction at Kew Gardens, was directly descended from Roger. The family, in fact, has produced a remarkable number of eminent people, including another great lawyer under Henry VIII., a general under Marlborough, a Bishop of Winchester, a First Lord of the Treasury, a Governor of Ceylon, and others of less note. Lord Chancellor Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, is also too prominent a character in history to require more than a mere statement of his connection with the Middle Temple, which was but slight. He entered as a student in 1625, and was called on 22nd November 1633. Of one of his immediate successors we do not know even so much as this. The famous or infamous Lord Chancellor Jeffreys was a law student here, but was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1668. His advancement was rapid, and he is said to have been the first Chief Justice who was created a peer. Blackstone, also a legal luminary of this Inn, was devoted to poetry in his early years, or, in the phraseology of the day, he 172 The Inns of Court sacrificed to the Muses. He also wrote a treatise on architecture, which was never published. These lighter studies were interrupted when he took seriously to business, and composed a " Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse." He was called in 1746, made a judge in 1770, and died in 1780. Another great Middle Templar was Cowper, who was called in 1688, and became Lord Chancellor and an earl. He was grand-uncle of the poet. The great Lord Chancellor Eldon was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1776, and became a bencher in 1783. He resided, however, in his early years, with his beautiful wife previously Bessie Surtees, the daughter of Aubone Surtees, a north-country squire in Carey Street, and a very dramatic scene is described by his biographers as having taken place at the time of the Gordon riots. He had barely time to go home and bring Mrs. Scott from their house, and lodge her safely within the Temple, when the mob was upon them. His wife's dress was torn off and her bonnet lost, but the admiring young barristers protected her from further insult, and no doubt were none the less anxious to befriend her because her beautiful ringlets were waving in the wind. " The mob have your hat," said her husband, " but they have not got your hair." Did he, perchance, imagine that they were going to scalp her? VIII LINCOLN'S INN Vandalism at Lincoln's Inn The Old Gate The Old Hall Thurloe New Square Stone Building The Drill Hall "The Devil's Own " The New Hall The Arms The New Library Scott's Work The Old Library Picturesque Aspect of Lincoln's Inn. IN a former chapter I had something to say about the origin of Lincoln's Inn. As it is now, there is much to admire and much also to deplore. The chapel has already been described, as well as the frightful Vandalism to which it has lately been sub- jected. But Lincoln's Inn has another claim on the attention of lovers of the picturesque. It is well known that many of the authorities of the Inn would like to get rid of the curious and ancient gate. Lord Grimthorpe, who has gone on a crusade against everything ancient at St. Albans, and who is chiefly responsible for the alterations to Lincoln's Inn Chapel, although he is said to have entrusted the 174 The Inns of Court actual work to a Mr. Salter, is leader of the move- ment. He has stated, in answer to the objection THE GATE-HOUSE, CHANCERY LANE. that the old gate is connected with many historical events, that " there could hardly be any old street or square in which somebody or something did not live Lincolris Inn '75 or happen." The exact bearing of this conclusive argument on the question of the preservation of an ancient monument is not very apparent. Built in THE CHAPEL AND THE OLD HALL. 1518, and bearing that date, it is one of the very few examples left in London of the Gothic school, and ranks with the Rolls Chapel, the Chapel of St. Peter in the Tower, what is left of the old Savoy, 176 The Inns of Court and the more ancient portions of St. James's Palace, as a relic of a very interesting transitional period in the history of architecture. The old Gothic had not quite gone out, the new Palladian had not quite come in, and the rare buildings which remain to us should, as it has been well remarked, be preserved under glass relics, easy to destroy, but impossible to replace. The gate was built while Cardinal Wolsey was Chancellor, and his successor, Sir Thomas More, must often have passed through it while it was still new. The gate consists of a massive tower rising four storeys above the ground floor. The brickwork is diversified by darker or vitrified bricks in diagonal lines. The groining under the arch has been removed, but the front still bears the arms of Henry VIII. with the garter, having on the dexter side the purple lion of Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, and on the sinister the arms and quarterings of Sir Thomas Lovell, who built the gate when he was a bencher of this Inn. He had twice been reader in the reign of Edward IV. The wood used in constructing the building was brought by water from Henley-on- Thames, but the bricks were made in the Coney- garth, where is now New Square, formerly called Searle's Court, from a bencher of that name who held a lease of it in the reign of William III. The old hall is even older than the gate, but has Line o Ins Inn 177 been so often renewed and altered, plastered and painted, that it now presents few features of antiquity. The registers of the society contain entries relating to the turret. " The Loover or Lanthorn set up in the sixth of Edward VI. and the charge accounted for carpenter's work and timber 45 s smith for the vane 8 s the guilding thereof I I s plumber's work 7.10. glazier's work 3i s ." There was an image of St. John in the hall before the Reformation, and a light burning before it, for we read that a certain student was expelled from the Inn for taking away the light and hanging up a horse's head " in despite of the saint." The hall is seventy-one feet long and thirty- two wide, and was stuccoed by Bernasconi in 1 800. The Chancellor and other legal luminaries used to sit in it before the building of the new Law Courts, under a picture by Hogarth of St. Paul before Felix, painted in 1750. Adjoining the hall to the south was the library, but the building is now let out in chambers. At the opposite corner of the court, the south-east, is an old turret, and here lived Thurloe, who was Secretary of State to Oliver Cromwell. A tablet stating the fact is on the outer face of the building in Chancery Lane, an honour Thurloe hardly deserved. Many greater and better men have lived in Lincoln's Inn and are uncommemorated. There was, how- N 1 78 The Inns of Court ever, for some time a memorial of the Treasurership of William Pitt in 1794 in the shape of a sun-dial, now gone. New Square, or Searle's Court, has already been mentioned. Formerly, another sun-dial stood in the centre. It was supported on a Corinthian column surrounded by Tritons, which formed a fountain, and was said to have been designed by Inigo Jones. An empty basin marks the place now. In addition to this green space, the gardens northward and westward are extensive, but in 1843 the splendid new hall and library were built on them, cutting off the southern half of the view into Lincoln's Inn Fields. From Stone Building, however, the view is still delightfully green, and would be more open only for an unsightly wall which marks the boundaries to the westward of the territory of the Inn. Stone Building was part of an attempt to rebuild the whole Inn, made in 1780. The attempt was abandoned, and for sixty years and more the Stone Building was incomplete. In 1845 Hardwick, who was then carrying out his fine Gothic design for the hall, completed the facade commenced by Sir Robert Taylor, and the incongruity of the fine Corinthian pilasters of freestone with the red-brick buildings nearly opposite, to my mind at least, conduces to a picturesqueness very pleasant to see. A good Lincolris Inn 181 part, but less than half, of the so-called Stone Building is of brown brick. The library was placed here on its removal from the smaller building near the old hall in 1787. I think the rooms assigned to it were in No. 2, where there is now a Common Room. Opposite this Common Room is a dingy building used as a Drill Hall by the Volunteers, and here in November 1891 Sir Frederick Pollock gave a lecture on " The History of the Sword," which was very highly appreciated at the time, the various points being illustrated in the course of the lecture by such accomplished swordsmen as Mr. Egerton Castle, Mr. Walter Pollock, and others. There have been many Volunteer associations connected with the Inns of Court, and various memorials of them are preserved in the Drill Hall. As far back as the time of the Spanish Armada a force was raised among the barristers and officers of the Inns. At the commencement of the great Civil War, too, a regiment was mustered here " for the security of the Universitie and Cittie of Oxford." At the time of the Scottish Rebellion in 1745, Chief-Justice Willes organised a force " for the defence of the King's person." A still more famous regiment was commanded by Lord Erskine, who had served in the Royal Navy before he took to the law. This was the corps on which 1 82 The Inns of Court George III. conferred the title of "The Devil's Own," which has cloven to the Inns of Court Volunteers ever since. By far the most conspicuous of the Lincoln's Inn buildings are those already mentioned as standing on the western side of the garden. This garden is said to be the actual scene of Ben Jonson's labours as a bricklayer, when, as Fuller says, he had a trowel in his hand and a book in his pocket. The walks under the elms which he celebrated have disappeared, but there are plenty of trees, and the great green expanse of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the scene of Lord Russell's death, is beyond. The new hall was designed by an architect of the first rank, Philip Hardwick. He built the classical portions of Euston Square railway terminus, and, as we have seen, completed the Stone Building in a Palladian style. There can be little doubt that a training in the severe rules of proportion necessary to the classical styles was not lost when a competent architect had to design a Gothic building. The want of it among our younger school of modern architects leads to the erection of such monstrosities as the new churches at Hammersmith, Stamford Brook, Palace Gardens, Bayswater, and many other places in the suburbs, where an unhappy architect, unacquainted with proportion, and forbidden for lack of means to plaster on meaningless ornaments to Lincoln s Inn 185 conceal his helpless ignorance, has been obliged to rear up what is not only ugly, but can never be improved. At Lincoln's Inn, Hardwick came to his work understanding thoroughly what was expected of him, and how he could attain to it. I should not like to say the new hall is the only successful building erected under the influence of the so-called "great Gothic revival," but it would be hard to find another equally good of the same size and importance. It contrasts admirably with the New Law Courts, built also in the Gothic style, but, except in the great hall and one or two other features, absolutely inferior in charm to Hardwick's building. It stands on a lofty terrace, and we can approach through the gate which leads from Lincoln's Inn Fields, observing as we pass the heraldic devices with which it is adorned. The arms of the Inn consist of fifteen golden fers de moline, or mill-irons, on a blue ground, and, forming what heralds call a canton, the shield of Lacy, " or, a lion rampant, purpure." What these arms, which have a very Elizabethan look, may mean, except in so far as they relate to the great Earl of Lincoln, I am unable to determine ; but the student of law who frequents the new hall and the library has little chance of forgetting them, as they meet his sight everywhere, in stone and brick, in metal-work, in wood-carving, 1 86 The Inns of Court and in stained glass. High up in the gable are the initials of the architect and the date of the foundation, 1843. Two years and a half sufficed for the completion of the building, which is of banded brick, like the old gateway, with stone dressings. The great south window is justly admired, not for its size only, but for its proportions. It is divided into seven principal lights. The hall consists of six bays, including a great projecting window near the north end, wrongly called an oriel in most of the books. The variety of out- line of the several parts does not disturb the dignity of the whole composition. The interior is extremely gorgeous with carving and stained glass, the great southern window containing the Queen's arms, by Willement In the eastern bay window at the other end is a collection of stained glass from the old hall. The screen is of carved oak, and the sides are panelled in the same material to about twelve feet from the floor. The roof, which rises to a height of sixty-two feet, is elaborately carved, both colour and gilding being also used to enhance the effect. A fresco by Mr. George Frederick Watts, R.A., is above the dai's. Like most London frescoes, it suffered from the atmosphere. An account by Professor Church of the process of cleaning it appeared in the Portfolio in March 1891. The picture is entitled T/ie School of Legislation, and represents an imaginary Lincoln s Inn 189 assembly of great law - givers, from Moses to Edward I. Adjoining the hall is the library. Mr. Spilsbury has written an account of it in his little book on Lincoln's Inn, and asserts that the first library here was the first of the kind in London. Mr. Brabrook, whose account of the Inn, read before the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, contains the best modern description of the buildings, has also a good deal to say about the books and manuscripts stored here. Mindful of the difficulty, or, indeed, the impossibility, of obtaining admission to the libraries of the Temple, I made no attempt at Lincoln's Inn. It is curious here to read some remarks of Herbert, who was librarian at the Middle Temple about the beginning of the present century. He says of the books in his charge that strangers " find a ready access during term-time." Since it was altered by Scott in 1873 the library is one hundred and thirty feet long, a length altogether out of proportion to its width, which is only forty feet, and making it into a gallery or corridor. It seems odd, when the extension was determined upon, that Scott offered no scheme by which the width might have been doubled or trebled and the proportions of Hardwick's building interfered with as little as possible. Scott, however, had little or no eye for proportion, and probably did not know 1 90 The Inns of Court to what an extent he injured the design of his pre- decessor, and Lord Grimthorpe, who was in some way associated with him in the design, was not calculated to help him in such a question. He thought mainly of the details, and here he succeeded, for it would be impossible, much as the outline differs, to distinguish between his mouldings and carvings and those of Hardwick. Another reason against increasing the length of the building was that it shut out the view northward, one of the best in Lincoln's Inn. The first library in the Inn dates back to the time of John Nethersale, a member of the Society who, in 1497, bequeathed forty marks, to be partly spent on the fabric of the building and partly on masses for the repose of his soul. Subsequent libraries have existed, as we 'have seen, in Old Square before 1787, and in Stone Building. In 1608 an ordinance was passed by the benchers as to laying out ten pounds in books, and prescribing how they should be bound, " with bosses, without chains." Mr. Spilsbury tells us that many of the volumes in his charge " still retain attached to their covers the iron rings by which they were secured." He quotes Dugdale as to the Middle Temple : " They now (1680) have no library, so that they cannot attain to the knowledge of divers learning, but to their great charges, by buying of such books as they lust to INTERIOR OF LINCOLN S INN HALL. Lincoln s Inn 193 study." In 1642 an order was made as to certain books bequeathed by Robert Ashley ; but in forty years, apparently, " it was at the last robbed and spoiled of all the books in it." It is evident that learning flourished more at Lincoln's Inn than in the Temple, and, naturally, the pursuit of chancery or equity business necessitated a reference to records and precedents ; but it is curious to ask how even the least enlightened of the Inns of Court would fare now without its collection of law books and books of reference. O 194 The Inns of Court The library of Lincoln's Inn being, as we have seen, thus constantly kept alive from the fifteenth century, was, of course, the recipient of many valuable gifts and bequests. Ranulph Chomeley's books, given in the reign of Elizabeth, are still preserved, as are others of William Rastell, a relative of Sir Thomas More, of William Prynne, and of Sir Matthew Hale. To these the later additions have been numerous, and Lincoln's Inn has occasionally offered a sporting price, as it is called, for a desirable volume as, for instance, when they bought the Introduc- tion to Prynne's Records for 335. There are many legal manuscripts in the library, some of them of great age. We shall have occasion to notice a few of them when we come to enumerate the eminent members of this Inn. It is as well to conclude this brief general summary of the more remarkable features of a place which, in spite of the untiring efforts of the recent authorities, still retains many reminiscences of old times and much that is of picturesque beauty as well. The view out towards Lincoln's Inn Fields from within the western bound- ary wall is not exceeded by any other in London. The contrast of red brick and green grass and trees makes in itself a charming picture, and the visitor who has leisure will find it well worth his while, after emerging from the gate, to turn sharply to the right and walk up the slope northward until he is well Lincoln s Inn 197 within the narrow lane called Great Turnstile, and then turn back to look round at the group of trees and buildings framed into a picture by the tall houses on either hand. The name, Great Turnstile, with its corresponding Little Turnstile at the other end of the square, has a delightfully old-world sound about it, and reminds us of the time when these really were fields, and the Turnstiles admitted pedestrians to a pathway under the wall of the Inn, and afforded a short cut to the Strand IX LINCOLN'S INN (Concluded} The Great Men Sir Thomas More William Rastell John Donne Egerton Cromwell Lambarde Prynne Hale Murray, Bath- urst, and Brougham Miss Brougham's Grave and Monument The Preachers Bishop Heber. THE legal luminaries of Lincoln's Inn have been very numerous. The list of great chancellors and statesmen begins early and continues late ; and though no Charles Lamb " was born in her," the catalogue of great men has been swelled by the perennial eminence of the successive chaplains. Butler was at the Rolls and Hooker was at the Temple, but Donne, Tillotson, Warburton, Hurd, and Heber are among the chaplains of Lincoln's Inn. Literary celebrities are fewer, but Horace Walpole was entered as a student in 1731, and Mackintosh gave his celebrated lectures on the law of nations in the old hall. Of Sir Thomas More we think as a Lincoln s Inn 199 writer rather than as a lawyer ; yet in his own day he had a great legal reputation, and earned a large income at the bar, before he became Chancellor. What with his attainments, his wit, his literary skill, his consistent if mistaken opinions, and the tragedy of his death, his figure is unquestionably one of the most interesting in any review of the worthies of Lincoln's Inn. More's father was a lawyer and a judge, and the future Chancellor was born in 1478, in Milk Street, Cheapside "the brightest star," says Fuller, in his quaint way, " that ever shone in that via lactea? He went to Oxford at fourteen, but in 1494, while still a mere boy, he became a law student at New Inn, and in 1496 entered at Lincoln's Inn. At Oxford he was attracted by the new learning, and his father, who feared that Greek might interfere with the old scholastic teaching then thought neces- sary for a lawyer, withdrew him before he could take a degree. He must have been called to the bar about 1500, and, in addition to lecturing on Augus- tine at St. Lawrence's in the Old Jewry, he became reader at Furnival's Inn, and a little later a Member of Parliament. Meanwhile his practice as a lawyer grew and increased, and he was already earning a good income. But, opposing the high-handed measures of Dudley, the extortionate minister of Henry VII., he deeply offended the King, who 200 learned with disgust that " a beardless boy had dis- appointed all his purpose." Soon after, More's father was sent to the Tower until he had paid an arbitrary fine, and young Thomas had to withdraw from the active practice of his profession. After the death of Henry VII. in 1509, More returned to public life, and rapidly rose in favour with the young King. But in proportion as he became more and more eminent in political life, his connection with Lincoln's Inn became more and more slender. By 1515 he was permanent Under-Sheriff of London, a Commissioner of Sewers, and a barrister whose practice brought him a sum which Mr. Seebohm (Oxford Reformers] estimates as equal to ^4000 a year of our currency. In May of this year he was employed on an embassy to Flanders, and two years later he was sent in a similar capacity to France, and his life becomes henceforth a part of the history of his country. We have nothing tangible to connect More with any residence in Lincoln's Inn, and, from the time of his marriage, he lived in Bucklersbury and at Chelsea. Two Lincoln's Inn worthies of very different kinds were descended from the More family. William Rastell, More's nephew, has already been mentioned, and his collection of Acts, from Magna Charta to the middle of the sixteenth century, is a well-known book, formerly very useful. Rastell is not to be CHAMBERS IN OLD SQUARE. Line o Ins Inn 203 confounded with John Rastell, his father, who printed an abridgment of the Statutes in 1519. William, whose mother, Elizabeth, was More's sister, rose to be Chief Justice, but probably died in exile during the reign of Elizabeth, as he had adhered to the old religion on the death of Queen Mary. But a still greater man was John Donne, whose connection with Lincoln's Inn was of a double char- acter. His mother was a daughter of Judge Rastell. He was early entered here as a law student, and after he took orders he was preacher to the Inn. Donne's life has been delightfully detailed by Izaak Walton, and connects him, through the romantic episode of his marriage, with another great man of the Inn, Lord Keeper Egerton. Walton makes a mistake in calling the Lord Keeper's wife Lady Ellesmere. She died before Egerton was made Lord Ellesmere and Chancellor by James I. To him Donne was secre- tary for five years, and he married, but secretly, Lady Egerton's niece, Anne, daughter of Sir George More, of Loseley, Chancellor of the Garter and Lieutenant of the Tower. When the marriage was discovered, Donne was for the time being ruined. The Chan- cellor gave him his dismissal, and Walton tells us that " he sent a sad letter to his wife, to acquaint her with it, and, after the subscription of his name, writ: 'John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.'" The pair lived long with a relative in Surrey, and afterwards 204 The Inns of Cozirt in Drury Lane with Sir Robert Drury. Sir Robert and Lady Drury took Donne with them in 1612, when they went to see the coronation of the Emperor Matthias. They were assigned no official place at the ceremony, and left Frankfort without seeing it. At Paris Donne was found by his friend " in such an ecstasy and so altered in his looks as amazed Sir Robert to behold him." He had seen a vision, or ghost, of his wife carrying a child. A servant was sent off at once to Drury House, who returned in twelve days to report that she was alive, but ill, and that a dead child had been born the day and hour Donne had seen the vision. Eventually Donne took orders at the direct instance of King James, and was made a royal chap- lain. Very soon after Mrs. Donne died, and Nicholas Stone sculptured a monument to her for the church of St. Clement Danes, where she was buried. About the same time " he was importuned by the grave benchers of Lincoln's Inn, who were once the com- panions and friends of his youth, to accept of their lecture." That Donne was eloquent there can be little doubt from the reports of his contemporaries, but his writings which are extant hardly bear out their praises. The authorities of Lincoln's Inn welcomed him warmly. " The love of that noble Society was expressed to him in many ways," says Walton ; " for besides fair lodgings that were set Lincoln s Inn 207 apart and newly furnished for him with all necessaries, other courtesies were also daily added." He con- tinued there about two years, " he preaching faithfully and constantly to them, and they liberally requiting him." After this he became a kind of English chap- lain to the Queen of Bohemia, and remained abroad for fourteen months, when we find him back at Lincoln's Inn, where he ministered till the King made him Dean of St. Paul's in 1621. Before he left the Inn he had laid the foundation-stone of a new chapel, and when it was consecrated on Ascension Day, 1623 Donne preached a sermon on the text, " And it was at Jerusalem, the feast of the dedication, and it was winter." The concourse of hearers was so great that " two or three were endangered and taken up dead for the time with the extreme press and thronging." Donne recorded his laying of the stone in a book still in the library, which he presented to it the great six-volumed treatise of Nicholas de Lyra on the Bible. Donne's personal popularity in his own time seems to have been unbounded. For us his chief claim to immor- tality rests in the fact that Izaak Walton included him among the number of those whose lives he wrote. One can but be sorry that Walton who, by the way, lived at the southern end of Chancery Lane, close to Lincoln's Inn and the gate Lord Grimthorpe wants to pull down did not write the lives of many other 208 The Inns of Court great folk, for really only Hooker, of all he has described for us, was a character of first-rate import- ance. But just as a family becomes eminent because its ancestor was mentioned, even disparagingly, by Shakespeare, so Walton conferred celebrity on whom he would. Among the lawyers, none is more interesting now than Donne's early patron, Egerton. The modern investigators who have so much that is absolutely certain to tell us about hereditary genius would probably call Thomas, the son of Alice Sparke, a sport. They call Buonaparte, Lord Byron and other prodigies, sports. Sir Richard Egerton, who was so kind as to allow the son of Alice to call himself Egerton, and who paid for his education and introduced him into what we call " Society," came of one of the most ancient families in England. Yet up to 1540 no sign of genius had appeared among them. The late Mr. Shirley, himself no credulous antiquary, could hardly over- estimate the antiquity of the Egerton family in Cheshire, a county with which he was well ac- quainted. But, except that one of them won the red Scottish lion to add to his arms as a reward for services rendered to Edward I. or Edward II., they attained to no degree of eminence until poor Alice Sparke produced her boy ; and from that time on the Egertons are earls and dukes, r Lincoln 's Inn 2 1 1 great men themselves and patrons of other great men, until, having conferred enormous benefits, material and intellectual, on their country, they became extinct, and, to use the Scottish phrase, " What cam' wi' a maid went wi' a maid." The earl who " commissioned " Milton to write Comus, the duke who " commissioned " Brindley to make the Bridgewater canals, and that odd clerical pluralist, the last man of the race, whose legacy enabled Bell to publish his Treatise on the Hand, and Whewell his Astronomy, and Chalmers his Adaptation, and Buckland his Geology, are not folk of whom England need be ashamed ; yet all were descended from the " sport," the films nullins, the man of " venerable presence," the " very comely proper man in person," whom Queen Elizabeth preferred to keep her Great Seal in spite of the opposition of the omnipotent Burghley himself. The " maid " with whom the race, fulfilling its motto, Sic Donee, ended, married an Egerton of the original uncontaminated stock, and the present Lord Egerton is her descendant. A very charming characteristic of Lord Keeper Egerton was his gentleness to young barristers. Francis Bacon acknowledges, almost with enthusiasm, his "fatherly care." He did his best to save the headstrong, brilliant young Essex, and on that fatal Sunday, already mentioned, when the unfortunate 2 1 2 The Inns of Court Earl precipitated his fate by his disastrous ride into the city, he left Egerton, who had come in vain early to remonstrate, locked up in a room of his NEW SQUARE, LINCOLN'S INN. house in the Outer Temple. Egerton occupied a kind of official residence as Lord Keeper at York House, farther west, in the Strand, and there, later on, had to perform the painful task of examining Essex. In York House, in 1617, after James I. had Lincoln s Inn 213 occupied the English throne for fourteen years, during all of which Egerton, now become Ellesmere, was his Chancellor, he fell ill unto death. The Ml? AREA IN NEW SQUARE. brilliant judgment he had delivered on the once famous and still important post-nati question, by which he settled it that children born in Scotland after James succeeded to the English throne are 214 The Inns of Court English subjects, probably did as much as anything else to smooth matters between two, up to that time, antagonistic nations. The King's visit was too late to revive the dying Chancellor. In vain the King promised to make him Earl of Bridge- water, a promise promptly fulfilled to his son, Milton's friend; and on the i5th March 1617, at the age of seventy -seven, the son of Alice Sparke, the sport and glory of the Egerton race, breathed his last in his palace by the Thames. And " surely," wrote Fuller, " all Christendom afforded not a person which carried more gravity in his counte- nance and behaviour than Sir Thomas Egerton." A tradition exists that Oliver Cromwell had chambers for a time in or near the Gate House of Lincoln's Inn, but it probably originated in the fact of Thurloe's residence in Old Buildings, or in Richard Cromwell's name being in the list of students in 1647. William Lambarde, the Kentish antiquary, belonged to this Inn, where he was a bencher, and had chambers allotted to him without payment. He was keeper of the records in the Tower, and his remarkable share of personal beauty won Queen Elizabeth's admiration. He sent her his calendar of State papers by the hands of Lady Warwick, but the Queen insisted that he should present it himself, saying, " If any subject of mine do me a service, I will thankfully accept it L incolris Inn 2 1 5 from his own hands." Prynne, one of Lambarde's successors at the Tower, was also of Lincoln's Inn, and lies buried under the chapel. Another pro- minent man of the Commonwealth period was Lenthall, reader in Lincoln's Inn in 1638, and afterwards, as is well known, Speaker of the House of Commons. He became Master of the Rolls, and one of the Commissioners of the Great Seal, as was also Oliver St. John, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Glynne, Fountaine, and others had to make their peace at the restoration of Charles II., but during the last years of Charles I. and the rule of Cromwell, Lincoln's Inn seems to have been the headquarters of the Republican party. Thurloe, Cromwell's Secretary of State, has already been mentioned as living in Old Buildings. Another very interesting character connected with Lincoln's Inn is Sir Matthew Hale. He came of a good old Gloucestershire stock, his mother being one of the Poyntz family, whose younger branches so greatly distinguished themselves against the rebels in the north of Ireland. The Poyntzes have disappeared both from Iron Acton and the county Armagh, but the towns of Acton and of Poyntz- Pass commemorate their Ulster achievements. Hale's father, Robert Hale, had been a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, but was living on his estate of Aldersley, in Gloucestershire, when Matthew was 216 The Inns of Court born. The future Chief Justice was at first intended for the Church, and with that view entered at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1626. Two years later, however, he relinquished this idea, and entered his name as a student at Lincoln's Inn on the ist September 1628. He had the courage to offer himself as counsel for Charles I. at his trial in Westminster Hall, but as the King denied the jurisdiction and constitution of the High Court of Justice, Hale's offer came to nothing. During Cromwell's rule he submitted himself to the existing government, and earned special praise from Thurloe. Nevertheless, at Cromwell's death he took an active part in the negotiations which led to the restoration of Charles II., and within a few days after the King's return was made Lord Chief Baron. After the Great Fire of 1666 Hale was a member of the Court for adjusting claims and promoting the rebuilding of London, and, invidious as the duty must often have been, he contrived to give satisfaction. The Court sat till 1672, but in 1671 Hale was made Chief Justice. In 1676, finding his health and faculties failing, he resigned, though the King was willing that he should only take a long leave of absence. At Christmas he died at Aldersley, where he had been born, and, more enlightened than many of his contemporaries, he expressly forbid his executors, by his will, to bury his body within the church. - af- I Line o Iris Inn 219 Hale's friends were numerous, and many of them were men of eminence. He was Selden's executor. AEP. SEARLE'S GATE, LINCOLN'S INN. With the divines connected with Lincoln's Inn in his time he was on terms of the warmest intimacy. Among his manuscripts bequeathed to the Library 220 The Inns of Court are writings of Archbishop Ussher, who was preacher in 1 647. He also corresponded with Bishop Wilkins of Chester, and was a friend of Tillotson, who was appointed preacher of the Inn in 1663. Isaac Barrow and Stillingfleet were also of the number of his friends. His name is connected, but in a differ- ent way, with that of another great man. On one occasion at Norwich two women were prosecuted before him for practising witchcraft. Both were condemned, sentenced to death by Hale, and the sentence executed. The chief witness against them was the great Christian moralist, the exposer of vulgar errors and Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne. What would Hale and Browne have said of our modern Spiritualists ? We must pass by many tempting names. Murray, afterwards Earl of Mansfield, was a student here in 1724, and was called to the Bar in 1730. He lived in i Old Square. Henry Bathurst was another scion of a noble family who studied and was called in Lincoln's Inn. He became Lord Chancellor in 1778, having already succeeded his father as Earl Bathurst. Lord Campbell also belonged to this Inn, as did Sugden, afterwards Lord St. Leonards. Another famous lawyer was Brougham, created Lord Brougham and Vaux in 1830. W r hen his only daughter, Eleanor Louisa, died, at the early age of eighteen, in 1839, Brougham with some difficulty Lincoln's Inn 223 obtained leave to bury her under the chapel, and expressed his intention of leaving his own body to be buried with hers. He died, however, at Cannes, and is buried there. A tablet to his daughter's memory is inscribed with a Latin epitaph by the Marquis Wellesley : " I, pete celestes, ubi nulla est cura, recessus ! Et tibi sit nullo mista dolore quies ! " Canning and Perceval were both barristers of this Inn, and the latter is commemorated by a tablet in the porch of the chapel, placed there by the Treasurer and the benchers. The list of Preachers comprises many great names besides those already mentioned. Herring, appointed in 1726, was made Bishop of Bangor in 1738, Archbishop of York in 1743, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1747. He made himself remark- able at York and earned the higher step of promotion by his adroitness and zeal in opposing the rising of the Jacobites of his diocese in the '45. Another Archbishop of York who was preacher at Lincoln's Inn was William Thomson, promoted from Gloucester in 1862, and not very long dead. Another Bishop of Gloucester was Warburton, who became preacher in 1746, and in 1768 founded the Warburtonian Lectures, annually delivered in the chapel, on " the truth of Revealed Religion in general and of the 224 The Inns of Court Christian in particular." Bishop Kurd, of Worcester, first held this lectureship, and wrote the biography of the founder. William van Mildert, the last of the earl-bishops of Durham, was preacher at Lincoln's Inn from 1812 to 1819. At his death, in 1836, the old palatine jurisdiction of the bishops ceased to exist. I have by no means exhausted the list of bishops who were preachers of this Inn, but one name more, in some respects the most remarkable of all, must be mentioned. Reginald Heber was here for one brief year, before he was appointed first Bishop of Calcutta. Heber had to contend against circumstances which would have damped the ardour of a less resolute and active-minded man. He was born to an old estate, and was what is sometimes termed a " squarson " for sixteen years. Many critics deny him poetical genius, but it is to be wished that some of our acknowledged poets had his power of melodious versification. His Newdigate prize poem, " Palestine," is one of the few examples of those compositions which have lived. The famous hymn, " From Greenland's icy moun- tains," was written at Wrexham, where his wjfe's father, the Dean of St. Asaph, was rector. It was in the year 1819, when royal letters had been issued authorising collections to be made in all churches for the eastern operations of the Society for the Propa- gation of the Gospel. Heber had come from Hodnet Lincoln's Inn 225 to hear Dean Shipley preach. On Saturday the Dean asked him to write some appropriate verses to be sung in the morning, and in a very short time he produced the hymn. In the first draft the "savage in his blindness " figures instead of the " heathen." There is an interesting account both of the hymn and of Heber himself in Mr. Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology. Brief as was his stay at Lincoln's Inn, the influence he exerted was deep and abiding, and his sudden death, three years later, was a cause of almost universal grief. Legal and religious associations like these rendered the old chapel of Lincoln's Inn a very sacred place. The marauders who undertook in 1882 to remodel it seem to me to deserve the reprobation of all right- thinking people. There is not very much that is ancient left in Lincoln's Inn, but what there is should be jealously guarded from profane hands. There is no reason whatever why the old gateway should be destroyed. Any competent architect could make it, without alteration, perfectly sound, weather-tight, and inhabitable. Prior to experience, it might have been thought a thing incredible that the benchers, some at least of whom must be considered educated men, should contemplate any other course of action. X GRAY'S INN Origin A Faulty Theory Dugdale's Account The Chapel The Ground Plan Opening to Holborn The Hall Attacks of "Re- storation" Chaplains and Preachers The Arms The Masque of Flowers Eminent Members The Cecils The Bacons The Gardens. THERE are two widely differing accounts of the first foundation of an inn for lawyers in the old house of the Lords Grey, or Gray, of Wilton. In some sense both may be true. Stow says that he was informed by a certain " Master Saintlow Kniveton " that gentlemen and professors of the common law took the house as far back as the time of Edward III. Moreover, it is asserted that William Skipwith, a serjeant-at-law in 1355, belonged to Gray's Inn, and was the first Reader. A man of that name is men- tioned by Dugdale, and became a Baron of the Exchequer in 1363. The difficulty is to connect him with Gray's Inn. Forty years earlier the Lords Grays Inn 227 Grey actually resided in their house here, and it was not until the reign of Henry VII. that they parted with it. We do not, until the following reign, have any distinct mention of the settlement of the lawyers in the four messuages, with their gardens, their wind- mill, and their chapel. Dugdale is very explicit as to the conveyance for 6 I 33. 4d. a year, first from " the prior and convent of Shene," then, after the dissolution of the religious houses by the King, to certain representatives of a society of students of law ; and he adds that by " the account of the treasurer of this society made 18 Nov. 32 Henry VIII. (1540), it is evident that the said rent of ,6 1 35. 4d. was paid to the King's use, for the same, for one whole year, ended at the feast of the Annunciation of Our Lady then past ; and so hath been ever since." Dugdale probably wrote this in 1670. He over- looked an interesting fact mentioned by Mr. Douth- waite {Grays Inn Notes, 1876), namely, that the rent was remitted by the Commissioners of the Commonwealth in 165 I, but resumed by Charles II., by whom it was sold to Sir Philip Matthews. In 1733 Gray's Inn purchased the rent from the heirs of Matthews, and now holds the property, subject to no rent or other payment. So much for Dugdale's opinion. Of course, Mr. Douthwaite, as Librarian, and also historian, of the Inn, would like to make it out as 228 The Inns of Court ancient as possible a perfectly laudable ambition on his part. The evidence of the existence of the society before the time of Henry VIII. is, however, extremely weak. Stated succinctly, it comes to this : In 1370 Lord Grey de Wilton had let "a certain Inn in Portepole " for 100 shillings. In Stow's Annals the authority of Master Saintlow Kniveton, as cited above, is given for the statement that the lawyers were Lord Grey's tenants. Much more to the point is a letter mentioning Sir William Byllyng, Chief Justice in 1464, preserved in the Paston Col- lection. William Paston met Byllyng on a journey in 1454, and heard from him that he had been "a felaw in Gray's Inn," as well as one Ledam, of whom he speaks. But this is the first, and for many years the last, mention of there having been any " felaws " in Gray's Inn. A list of the Readers, with their arms, from 1359, is quite apocryphal. The first is Skipwith, already mentioned, and the writer makes him a Justice of the Common Pleas. But Skipwith, we know, was a Baron of the Exchequer. The very first item in the list, therefore, breaks down when examined ; and it is hardly worth while to mention that the third Reader named is Sir William Gascoigne, about whom such wonderful stories had been concocted before Shakespeare's time. This story would seem to be the first of them. For their refutation we may look at Bishop Stubbs's Constitu- Grays Inn 231 tional History (iii. 76), where the committal of Prince Henry is carefully examined. As to the Byllyng statement, in 1454, it only goes to show that two persons, Byllyng himself and one Ledam, were fellow-lodgers in some part of Lord Grey's exten- sive tenement. In 1505 Edmund, Lord Grey, parted with it to Hugh Denys and Mary his wife ; and even Mr. Douthwaite will hardly claim Mary Denys as a member of the Inn ; but the mention of her name seems inconsistent with the possibility of the lawyers being already established there. Dugdale begins his list of Readers with John Spelman, in 1516, and of the Treasurers with William Wal- syngham, " primus thesaurarius electus term Mick" Here we are on safe ground, which is not Mr. Douthwaite's position when he misquoted the Paston letter, and makes so much of the vague reference of Byllyng to Ledam. Lawyers often resided in great houses, which never became Inns of Court or Chancery ; as, for example, in the palace of the Bishop of Ely, and in the monastery of the Carthusians farther east. The point of greatest interest is that with Lord Grey's inn the lawyers also took over his old-estab- lished chapel and chaplain. From this it almost follows that the present chapel is the same as that of which we read under the year 1315, when John, Lord Grey, gave lands in the manor towards the 232 The Inns of Court endowment of a chaplain. It furthermore connects Gray's Inn with another great mediaeval institution, which also, with modifications, exists still St. Bartholomew's. The land was given to the prior and canons, the predecessors of the warden and other authorities of the modern hospital. There is no reason to suppose that the sacred ministrations were ever interrupted. On the contrary, the historical presumption is the other way. There may be frag- ments of the original 1315 chapel in the walls of the present building, just as there are fragments of a chapel of John of Gaunt in the walls of the Royal Chapel of the Savoy, although it has been at least twice destroyed and restored. At present the chapel of Gray's Inn may be described as in a very genuine state, containing fragments of ancient date, and, unfortunately, some stained glass and some fittings in the worst taste imaginable. But it may easily be made to look better without any very drastic measure of " restoration," and fortunately the great destroyer of Lincoln's Inn has no influence here. The plaster might, in any case, be removed, and the walls examined for remains of early date. It is, however, rumoured that the benchers are going to build a wholly new chapel on another site, which, considering the venerable associations of the old chapel, seems a pity. We can make out by the ground-plan that the Gray s Inn 233 mansion of Lord Grey was in all respects like that of any other wealthy nobleman or great ecclesiastic. There was a gate opening from the roadway of Gray's Inn Lane. Within there was a range of buildings on the left, beginning with the chapel. On the right to northward was a wide field with gardens and pleasaunces, open to the view of the swelling pastures and the distant woods of Highgate and Hampstead. The house turned its back entirely on the noise and bustle of Holborn, and must have appeared like a rural villa, though so near to the great city. Houses which did not belong to Lord Grey were between him and Holborn, and are mentioned in some early deeds at St. Paul's (IX. Report, Hist. MSS. Commission). At first there was but a single messuage or tenement " in the parish of St. Andrew in Portepul without the Bar, in the suburb of London." This was in 1328. Later on Robert Frewell has the land on lease, and by that time it has acquired a name, or sign, " Le herte on the hoope," and Robert has leave to build on a vacant space at the opposite side of the street of Holborn, " near the fountain." This was in 1412, and shows that the suburbs were already creeping westward. By the sixteenth century the Inn was surrounded with houses, except on the north side, and Portpool Lane had begun to call itself " Grayes Inne Lane." The modern Portpool 234 The Inns of Court Lane is at right angles. The crowded locality was probably sold to the Denyses with great alacrity, as it had ceased to be a desirable place of residence for a nobleman. Some parts of the house were already let out, principally, as in the case of Byllyng, to lawyers. In 1416 "a certain attorney of the Lord de Talbot " is mentioned as "dwelling in Graye's Inne, at the house of the Treasurer of England " ; so that the house had probably been let to Sir Philip Leech, who was then Treasurer. Down to 1594 the principal entrance was still from Gray's Inn Lane, but in that year the society bought a parcel of ground in Holborn, from one Fulwood, whose name is still commemorated in Fulwood's Rents, and the passage was made. A relic of this change of front may be seen in the door of the chapel, which still opens on the north into what used to be called " Chappel Court," and is now Gray's Inn Square. But the hall, when rebuilt in Queen Mary's reign, was made to open on the opposite side, evidently in anticipation of the improvement shortly afterwards effected. This hall almost rivalled in interest that of the Middle Temple, and considerably exceeded it in antiquity. But a madness seized the benchers in 1828, like that which overtook the Fellows of Pembroke College at Cambridge about 1875. The Grays Inn 237 ancient building, in which The Masque of Flowers had been performed before James I., was altered as much as was possible without actually pulling it down. Stucco reigned supreme in London in those days, and so the walls, and those of the chapel, were thickly coated with that material. The old red tiles were torn down and replaced with slate. A turret, or louvre, of ridiculous design was placed on the top. Finally, a wooden parapet was put up to set off the rest of the new arrangements. A second attack supervened in I 867, and the old red-bricked gate was sacrificed. I remember it perfectly well, and used to wonder if the chamber overhead was that in which David Copperfield and Dora found " oceans of room." It is now as uninteresting as Lincoln's Inn Chapel and twice as ugly. The hall, however, is now in process of " restoration," and for once we may approve of what is being done. Certainly nothing could mar it as it was ; and if the alterations include the restitution of the tiled roof and the disestablishment of the turret as well as the removal of the stucco, we shall rejoice, though trembling for the possibilities which the other Inns of Court have taught us to dread. Lately, Jacob Tonson's old shop, which had stood for centuries by the gate into Gray's Inn Lane, was destroyed for some reason which has not transpired. We may be sure, judging from analogy, that it was 238 The Inns of Court wholly inadequate. The aphorism of Lord Grim- thorpe constantly comes into the mind when we contemplate old London sites " There is no street or square where somebody or something has not lived or happened " and so far as I can judge, corporations, ecclesiastics, and lawyers are all able to follow the non sequitur which so entirely eludes the grasp of my modest reasoning faculty, and agree that such streets and squares should be at once destroyed. We see that the corporation has destroyed Emanuel Hospital, that the bishop is longing for the site of Wren's beautiful tower at St. Dunstan's-in- the-East, and that the lawyers are hungering for the old bricks of Lincoln's Inn Gate. There is a view of the hall in Ireland's book, but shortly before it was taken the chapel had " been newly cased with stone, and, except the Gothic windows, completely modernised." It was in one of these windows that " the image of St. Thomas a Becket was gloriously painted, which window Edward Hall, one of the Readers of this house at that time, was ordered to take out in consideration of the King's command, in the thirty-first of his reign, that all the images of Thomas a Becket, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, should be obliterated." Hall was further enjoined to " place another instead thereof, in memory of our Lord praying in the mount." Dugdale has particulars as to the vest- 7s/) / Grays Inn 241 ments and vessels removed in the reign of Edward VI., and replaced under Mary, and adds that as late as 1623 there was "an order that all women should be barred from the chapel at sermons," which was made still more stringent in 1629, when no women or boys were suffered to come within the chapel at any time. The chaplain seems occasionally to have been called "dean." Mr. Barrett was dean of the chapel in 1698. Besides the chaplain there was a preacher from a very early period, and some great names appear in the list of preachers, one of whom William Wake became Archbishop of Canter- bury in 1 7 1 6. In the east window are the arms of this preacher beside those of Archbishops Juxon and Sheldon, and of three bishops who, at different times, had been admitted to the membership of the society. Gray's Inn was always famous for its masques and interludes. In the reign of Henry VIII. a fine was imposed upon all who left the hall before the conclusion of the revels. With respect to proces- sions and pageants this society had a kind of alliance with that of the Inner Temple, in token of which the Pegasus figures on the great gate of the square, and the Gray's Inn " Griffin segreant " similarly figures at the Inner Temple. Mr. Douth- waite, by the way, quotes a Harleian manuscript as to these arms, from which it appears that the honourable R 242 The Inns of Court college of Gray's Inn " doth beare for their Coat, Azure, an Indian Griffon, proper, Sergeant" (sic}. Stow, however, says that the Inn might, " by ancient custom of honourable favour," bear the Grey arms, but adds that it had chosen instead " a griffon, or, in a field, sables, and so they are furnished already very well." Beaumont and Fletcher wrote a masque entitled The Masque of tlie Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, which seems to have been performed alternately by the two societies, the title being varied accordingly. In 1612 it was played at Whitehall before the Court. A very fine performance had taken place in the previous reign, when " the Prince of Purpoole " and his train visited Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich in state. The Masque of Flowers was performed in 1613 at Gray's Inn, and repeated in 1887 on the occasion of the Queen's Jubilee. The lamented John O'Connor painted the scenery. Mr. Lewis Wingfield, also unfortunately gone over to the majority, designed the dresses, and everything else was carefully and successfully carried out. Four years later it was again revived, this time at the Inner Temple, where O'Connor's scenery, which had found its way to a workmen's club in Holborn, was touched up for the occasion. This performance was suggested by Lady Halsbury to augment the funds of the Convalescent Home at Westgate. By a Gray s Inn 243 marvellously annoying piece of red tape the County Council refused leave to the committee to take money at the doors we may conjecture there were not enough invitations sent to members of that august body but eventually it was understood that the charity benefited handsomely. There is a legend, but I fear unsupported by evidence, that Shakespeare performed in the hall of Gray's Inn, and another, also feebly supported, that one of his dramas was played here in his lifetime. It is not impossible, but we want such proof as that afforded by Manningham's Diary as to the Middle Temple. There is, however, no doubt that the great Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, did organise a masque for this Inn, and, moreover, paid all the expenses to the amount of 2000, refusing assistance from the benchers. Evelyn mentions the revels at Gray's Inn, and remarks on an old riotous custom, which " has relation to neither virtue nor policy." The last recorded revel took place in 1773. There are not nearly so many eminent lawyers among the students as are to be found in the Temple or at Lincoln's Inn. On the other hand, the list, short as it is, contains some greater names than any to be seen elsewhere. There may be doubts, as we have seen, about Gascoigne, who is also claimed for the Middle Temple, but there are none about the two Bacons, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, 244 The Inns of Court admitted in 1524, and Thomas Wriothesley, ad- mitted in 1534, made Lord Chancellor ten years later, and Earl of Southampton in 1547. Dugdale also tells us that John Dudley, Duke of Northumber- land, was a member of Gray's Inn. He must have been elected as a compliment in the days of his greatness. He was born in 1502, and was knighted before Calais in 1523. Dugdale, by a misprint, says he became a member in 1558: but he was really admitted in January 1553, and was beheaded on Tower Hill in August of the same year. Another soldier, George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, is also mentioned, but Mr. Doyle says nothing of his having been admitted. Much more probable are the names of Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of the Royal Exchange, and the " prince of antiquaries," William Camden. The great Lord Burghley, the progenitor of the Exeter and Salisbury families, certainly belonged to this Inn, having been admitted in 1541. His second son, Robert, first Earl of Salisbury, is mentioned by Dugdale, who gives his arms as being in the bay window of the hall ; but it is possible he mistakes him for his son, the second earl, who was called early in 1605, being already a Knight of the Bath, so that the call was probably purely complimentary to the son of his father, or rather to the grandson of his grandfather. But the great glories of Gray's Inn are the two Grays Inn 247 Bacons father and son. The elder, Nicholas, whose arms are also given by Dugdale, was born at Chislehurst in 151 o, and admitted in 1532; he rose to be Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in virtue of which office he resided at York House, like his successor, Ellesmere, mentioned in a former chapter. Here, three years later, in 1561, his son, Francis, was born. He commenced to study at Gray's Inn in 1576, when only fifteen, and was called in 1582, when just twenty-one. His advancement was rapid, but his public career belongs to history, though he left his mark very plainly on Gray's Inn, as we shall see. Everybody is acquainted with his delightful essay, " Of Gardens." To a long list of plants for winter, of evergreens ; for spring, violets, the early daffodil, the daisy, the almond and the cherry-tree in blossom, and the sweet-brier ; for summer, the pink, the rose, the lily, and the cherry-tree in fruit ; for autumn, grapes and poppies, among many others he appends a sentence which seems to speak plainly of Gray's Inn : " These particulars are for the climate of London, but my meaning is perceived, that you may have ver perpetwtm> as the place affords." And truly there is no more pleasant garden easily accessible from the middle of our great city. But, in Bacon's time, the view was wide towards the north and west, only terminating with Highgate and Hampstead, 248 The Inns of Court over which, standing in the garden of Gray's Inn, Bacon could see the road winding away among the woods, or what was left of the old Middlesex forest towards St. Albans, where his country seat lay. It was on these selfsame wooded slopes that he met his death. In the winter of 1625 and 1626 he had sought his favourite seclusion of Gray's Inn, where, more than twenty years before, he had planted the elm-trees in the walks. Issuing thence on the 2nd April, he started to cross the hills, the snow lying thick and white on the ground. It occurred to him to try an experiment with the snow, as to whether it would not preserve meat as well as salt. The chill made him feel faint, and he was helped into Lord Arundel's house, close by, and he never left it alive. The house must, in those days, have been perfectly visible from " the mount " he had raised in Gray's Inn garden. Lamb mentions the beauty of this garden in his essay " On some of the Old Actors," and calls Verulam Buildings, on the east side, " accursed "- " cutting out delicate green crinkles, and shouldering away one of two of the stately alcoves of the terrace ; the survivor stands gaping and relationless, as if it remembered its brother. They are still the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten have the gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law- Grays Inn 249 breathing. Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks." There is probably no other spot in London which we may assert has been written about by Bacon, Addison, and Lamb, our three greatest essayists. Sir Walter Raleigh told Sir Thomas Wilson of a long conversation he had with Bacon in Gray's Inn walks. There was a summer-house until nearly the close of the last century which was pointed out as a favourite resort of Bacon's an octagonal seat covered with a roof, on the western side of the gardens. It had a Latin inscription to record that it had been erected by the great Chancellor in 1609. Until this year, Gray's Inn gardens contained one of the few rookeries remaining in London. Against them the benchers seem to have nourished a kind of sullen hate. In 1875 they had some of the trees cut down in which the rooks were actually nesting at the time. The general public were very indignant. It is rather sad to find that the benchers in general did not disavow the action of the Treasurer in thus frightening away the birds, as the benchers of the Middle Temple disavowed the doings of Daines Barrington on a similar occasion. However, after an interval the rooks returned. They were again disturbed and again returned. But this year, with a refinement of cruelty or callousness, they have been finally warned off and had to go, leaving their 250 The Inns of Court miserable offspring just out of the shell to perish of starvation and cold. It is to be feared that the people who habitually use the gardens would have heard with less sorrow that the benchers themselves had experienced this horrible fate. So does one barbarism engender many. The visitor will find some of the ironwork worth looking at at the entrance, but must not fancy that any of the trees are among those planted by Bacon, though some of them may, when they were very young, have been here when Samuel Pepys, as he records, " was very well pleased with the sight of a fine lady " who was walking in the gardens. XI THE INNS OF CHANCERY The Inns of Chancery are abolished Their Number Other Inns Our Lady's Inn Stow's Account Furnival's Inn Clifford's Inn and the Inner Temple -The Dinner and Grace The Hall A Curious Region Serjeants' Inn The Rolls The Record Office A Walk from Fleet Street to Chancery Lane. IT might, prior to experiment, be thought difficult to describe from personal observation what does not exist. There are, as a fact, no Inns of Chancery. The Inns of Court, whose offspring they were held to be, have cut them adrift ; and they have nearly all, finding themselves with few privileges and no duties, sent the portraits of the old lawyers out of their halls to Mr. Scharf, sold what in ecclesiastical language would be called the corpus or body of their prebend, and dissolved themselves into their con- stituent elements. Inns of Chancery had for a long time been in a more or less anomalous position. They alternately repudiated their allegiance to the 252 The Inns of Court Inns of Court, to which they were reputed to belong, and invoked their assistance and protection. The result was, of course, eminently unsatisfactory. By degrees the number of recognised Inns was diminished. Any excuse was sufficient for the abolition of a little one ; and when the Serjeants found their ancient order suppressed, and discovered at the same time that the two places, on either side of Fleet Street, where their Inns had stood were absolutely at their own disposal, the other minor Inns inquired also into their own position, with the result I have indicated. The Inner Temple has no longer any hold on Clifford's, Lyon's, or Clement's Inn. New Inn similarly cast off its subjection to the Middle Temple. Furnival's and Thavies' Inns have long been independent of Lincoln's Inn. Within a very few years the two most picturesque of all, Staple Inn and Barnard's Inn, have declared themselves independent, and signalised the declara- tion by selling their buildings. Both houses, however, have fallen into good hands ; and I can only beg my readers to pray for the prosperity of those who have saved such delightful examples of old-world architecture for the pleasure and instruction of another generation. Besides the regular Inns of Chancery there were always, and, indeed, are now, a certain number which were never acknowledged by anybody. Scroope's, The Inns of C/iancery 253 long marked by Scroope's Court, Holborn, was a kind of junior to Serjeants' Inn. Strand Inn was pulled down by the Protector, Duke of Somerset, in the reign of Edward VI., to make way for the great palace he meant to build, but did not, where is now Somerset House. Near where is now the Holborn Viaduct formerly stood St. George's Inn, and here, before the middle of the fifteenth century, law students had a recognised lodging. Stow's account should be quoted. St. George's Lane was one of those little streets by the Fleet which Farringdon Street has so completely obliterated. On the north side of it Stow saw " an old wall of stone inclosing a peece of ground up Seacole Lane, wherein by report stood an inne of Chauncery : which house being greatly decayed, and standing remote from other houses of that profession, the company removed to [a] common hosterie, called, of the signe, Our Lady Inne, not far from Clement's Inne, which they procured from Sir John Fineox, Lord chiefe Justice of the King's bench, and since have held it of the owners by the name of New Inne, paying therefore vj P. rent by the yeare as tenants at their owne will : for more (as it is said) can not be gotten of them, and much less will they be put from it." This Inn of "Our Lady" became accordingly New Inn, and the wayfarer in Wych Street may have his attention called to an archway, over which is a shield of arms representing a bunch of lilies in a pot, the flowers argent, the field vert. Lilies thus 254 blazoned are always held to be emblems of Our Lady, and it is to a sign of the same pattern that we may attribute the street name of Lilipot Lane or Lilipot Court, not unfrequent in old English cities. While we are quoting Stow, it may be as well to run through all he tells us about these Inns of Chancery. Of Barnard's Inn he says it is also called " Motworth Inne," mistaking " Motworth " for Mackworth. The visitor may have some trouble in finding it, but if he chances to know the Mackworth coat-of-arms he will recognise it high up over a modest doorway between 22 and 23 Holborn, and, entering, may prepare for a very pleasant surprise. Dugdale gives the shield as " per pale, indented, ermine and sable, a chevron, or, frettee, gules." Stow says this is " the second Inne of Chauncerie, belonging to the Deane and chapter of Lincolne," and tells us nothing more. Of Staple Inn he says it is the third, " but whereof so named I am ignorant ; the same of late is, for a great part thereof fayre builded, and not a little augmented." It is curious for us to observe that what in i 599 was new is now almost the oldest fragment left in any of the inns. We shall have occasion, in the next chapter, to offer an explanation of the name, partly founded on the very singular and apparently ancient shield-of-arms. Stow is the first author to give us any intelligible "~X i < ^^saip*}* ^^s^ .. ^JIWSK ltf " ';Hi I. '; *3 5 '-v^ 1 |iififf' S^ ^.ttjiS^'? ^ t .'hf ' r ***4 ttiaau^, . . 257 account of these houses. I do not think any of them were much older than the very end of the sixteenth century, when he wrote his Survey. We have to take several things into the account in forming this opinion. Before the reigns of the Tudors there was very little faith in the stability of English institutions. Battles between the Yorkists and Lancastrians had been fought on several occa- sions, at Barnet, at St. Albans, and at other places almost within sight of London, and frequent alarms drove all settlers in the suburbs back behind the city walls. Therefore it seems probable that lawyers who had to take houses took them where they would have the maximum of protection 'and the minimum of risk. Such a place was St. George's Inn, well inside the city boundaries and close to the city wall. When things got more settled it was safe to move out to Wych Street, for though it might reasonably be asserted that, as a roadway, Wych Street is more ancient than many streets which were reckoned within the city walls, yet it lacked the security of the walls, and even that security afforded to the Templars by their castel- lated buildings and by the outer defences of the suburban fortifications. When it was found that Wych Street was safe, other Inns of Chancery sprang into existence, all just within or just without the lines of the outer fortifications. Stow s 258 The Inns of Court thus sums them up : " Of these houses there be at this day fourteen in all, whereof nine do stand within the liberties of the citie and five in the subburbes thereof." He proceeds to enumerate them all, both Inns of Court and of Chancery, and we observe that the following have utterly perished since his day, namely, Thavies' Inn, now an open street ; Lyon's Inn, now the site of a theatre ; Strand or Chester's Inn, already mentioned ; and another, mentioned by an ancient law-writer, Fortescue, which Stow cannot identify. Of Thavies' Inn he has nothing to tell. Of Furnival's he says it formerly belonged to Sir William Furnival and Thomasin, his wife, in the reign of Richard II. Of Barnard's he tells us further that John Mack- worth, Dean of Lincoln, gave it, in the reign of Henry VI. (1454), to the chapter of Lincoln Cathedral, " to find one sufficient chaplain " to sing masses for the repose of his soul. How it came into the hands of the lawyers we do not know. He is puzzled about Staple Inn. As to Clifford's Inn, after reciting the gift of the messuage to Robert Clifford, and the lease by Isabel Clifford, his widow, in 1344 to students of the law, he says "the said students " had it in his time at four pounds by the year. Of Clement's Inn he has little to say, except that it stands near to the fair fountain called Clement's Well ; of New Inn he recapitulates what The Inns of Chancery 261 we have already quoted, and adds that Sir Thomas More, " sometime Lord Chancellor, was a student in this new inn, and went from thence to Lincolne's Inn." Of Lyon's Inn he has nothing to say. This, then, is the first account we have of these interesting houses. All have now ceased to keep up any special connection with the law. In some the hall and public buildings have disappeared. The old dinners have ceased to be eaten, the old meetings and motes have ceased to be held ; but here and there, among the relics that remain of them, we find perishing memories of the old days, and, as I have already had pleasure in observing, some of the oldest are the best cared for by their present owners and occupiers. Furnival's Inn presents no features of the slightest importance. It was wholly rebuilt in 1820, a good part being made into a hotel, and a statue of the contractor being set up in the courtyard. The older building is always attributed to Inigo Jones, except the Gothic hall, part of a still older building. The front to Holborn was exceedingly picturesque, and is well figured in Wilkinson. Mr. Wheatley tells us that Charles Dickens was living in Furnival's Inn when Pickwick came out. He places John West- lock (Martin Chuzzlewif) in this Inn. From here, where his eldest son was born, Dickens removed in 1837 to Doughty Street. We must not forget that 262 TJie Inns of Court Sir Thomas More was reader for more than three years. From 1547 it belonged to Lincoln's Inn by conveyance from an Earl of Shrewsbury, Baron Furnival. Of Clifford's Inn, which, like Furnival's and others, was called after an ancient family, there are plenty of remains, some parts of them very picturesque. It was always reckoned, except by its members, a dependency of the Inner Temple. They asserted its freedom. The matter can never now be settled. The " Principal and Rulers " of Clifford's Inn exist nominally still, and manage their little estate. For many years it was customary for the Inner Temple to send a message or summons to Clifford's Inn, and the message having been duly and formally received, was left unanswered, and the matter dropped for another year. It will be seen that the position of Clifford's Inn differed from that of Furnival's or any other, where the Inn of Court had originally acquired and held a lease or the freehold. But Clifford's Inn always paid its own way and had its own customs, its great days and its peculiar rules. The rulers paid four pounds a year rent, but otherwise the house, which contains a good hall, a garden, and other refinements and necessities, is practically freehold. The dinners were quite as ceremonious as those in either of the Temples, and a table was specially provided for what was called the " Kentish Mess." The Inns of Chancery 265 What this commemorated I have not been able to discover. Some of the Cliffords were connected with Kent, but not till long after the establishment of the lawyers in their old town house. It was a member of the Kentish mess who performed on certain stated occasions the ceremony of grace. It was not, strictly, saying or even singing grace. Four small loaves, conjoined in the shape of a cross, were brought in by an attendant and placed on the high table in front of the Principal. Standing up, he solemnly dashed the bread on the table before him. This he did three times amid profound silence. Then the loaves were rapidly passed down to the last man in the Kentish mess, who, clasping them in his arms, rushed with them from the hall. Some poor women used to wait without for the loaves and other gifts after a dinner. It must not be supposed that the dinners were with- out some grace, for they began with the words, " Pro hoc convivio, Deo gratia." No speeches were allowed, and but two toasts, " Ancient and Honourable "- referring, of course, to the house and " Absent Members." The lawyers used the old arms of the Clifford family, " chequee or and azure, a fess gules " ; to this they added " a bordure, bezantee, of the third." Dugdale omits the bezants, which some may have considered too direct an allusion to the golden harvest many of the members no doubt reaped. In a former chapter I have mentioned the arduous 266 The Inns of Court labours of Sir Matthew Hale in settling the numerous boundary disputes which grew out of the Great Fire. The Commissioners, of whom he was the chief, sat in the hall of Clifford's Inn to hear the cases brought before them, from which, and other reasons, we gather that though the south side of Fleet Street was con- sumed, and some parts of the Temple, the north side escaped. Both Coke and Selden are mentioned as having lived as students in Clifford's Inn, but there is little to connect it with general history. What little there is in the way of tangible antiquity is fast perishing, but when I remember the region first it comprised a group of very curious and interesting buildings. Among them were the Rolls institutions, at that time more or less in a transitional state, gradually developing into the great department they have now become ; the Serjeants' Inn, Chancery Lane, and Clifford's Inn, peculiar to lawyers, all hemmed in and kept together in their corner by St. Dunstan's Church. The Serjeants finally ceased out of Chancery Lane in 1876. For many years the Order had been an anachronism. Originally, it seems likely, a branch of the Templars, possibly their lay or even their religious servants, they gradually developed into a separate order, and occupied a corner, very plainly marked on any map, of the Templars' territory. I am aware that Mr. Foss, as quoted with approval by The Inns of Chancery 269 Mr. Wheatley, asserts that the Serjeants settled in Chancery Lane before Fleet Street, and fortifies this opinion by a reference to Dugdale. But every day I live I see more clearly how necessary it is always to verify quotations. I have done so in this case, and find that Mr. Foss has wholly misinterpreted the meaning of Dugdale. Nay, if Dugdale had said what Mr. Foss seems to think he did, I should have ventured to differ with him. He does say that he finds the Chancery Lane house mentioned as early as 1393. He also finds the Serjeants in the Fleet Street house early in the reign of Henry VI., " if not before." But if we look at a plan of the Temple we shall see that this Fleet Street house .is cut off from the territory of the Templars, and that at the time it was first settled the same wall or line of wall separated both from the territory of the White Friars. I have already touched upon the subject, which bears the double disadvantage of being exceedingly obscure and not exceedingly interesting. The judges, theoretically at least, were supposed to be chosen from among the King's " servientes," and, until the abolition of the Order, when a lawyer was nominated a judge his first act was to get him- self admitted a serjeant. Lord Campbell is thus quoted by Mr. Wheatley : " First I was made a serjeant, and then my patent writ as Chief Justice was handed to me, and having taken many strange 270 The Inns of Court oaths my title to hang, draw, and quarter was complete." This ceremony cost nearly 700. The "coif" appears to have been a linen cap to wear under the wig. In the east every good Moslem shaves his head and wears a coarse woollen cap, called a fez, or a tarboosh, according to the pattern, but under it he always places a white linen cap, or coif. Perhaps the Templars brought it home from the Holy Land, and perhaps their first " servientes " may have been Oriental prisoners. The Fleet Street house, adjoining the Temple, was abandoned by the Serjeants before the end of the eighteenth century, and pulled down to make way for private houses and insurance offices. The visitor may seek through it for antiquities now in vain, except for the initials " S. I." and a date, 1 669, which is on one house. This would answer to the rebuilding after the fire of 1666. The Serjeants' Inn in Chancery Lane may still be seen. You enter through an archway and find yourself in a very narrow court of not very old houses, bounded on the farther side by a railing, through which is a view of grass and trees belonging to some other institution. You have to look long and carefully before you make out the little hall, now a lawyer's orifice, with its windows and its clock, all in good too good repair, and with but the smallest possible claims to be picturesque. However, f If "Ml 273 we may be glad they were not utterly destroyed in February 1877, when the brotherhood dissolved itself, sold the hall with its five painted windows for ,57,100, and divided the proceeds among themselves, a proceeding much commented upon at the time. They had the generosity, however, not to sell the portraits of their predecessors, but sent them, to the number of twenty-six, to the National Portrait Gallery. Immediately to the north of Serjeants' Inn and lately exposed to the public gaze from Chancery Lane, as the row of houses in the street was pulled down is the Chapel of the Rolls, and, close behind it, the Record Office, with its vast Gothic tower, designed by Pennethorne. The liberty of the Rolls is a parish in itself, and was set apart, with a house and chapel, by Henry III. for the reception of converted Jews. The records of the house are probably in existence, and may some day see the light. The Jews in Spain founded some of the most illustrious families of the Peninsula ; and it would be exceedingly interesting if we could find out the descendants of some of the converts of Henry III. among our English aristocracy. But the decree of i 290, by which the Jews were banished, very soon put an end to the use of the house in Chancery Lane, and in 1377 it was annexed to the then newly founded office of Master of the Rolls. Nearly all T 274 The Inns of Coiirt the domestic buildings have now disappeared, and it is said that the chapel, which, like the gate nearly opposite, and so many other Gothic buildings in London, dates from the time of the Tudors, is to be turned into a kind of museum of rare documents from the adjoining Record Office. I have already spoken of the monuments. Behind the Rolls, south of a long railing, is a green space, carpeted with grass and shaded with trees, and surrounded on two sides by old buildings. We look down into it from the steps of the Record Office, and when, also, we enter the old court of Serjeants' Inn, we see it beyond an iron gateway eastward. This is the old garden of Clifford's Inn. It is bordered on the south by a very picturesque group of old houses with deep cornices and tiled roofs, among which, almost adjoining the Hall of the Serjeants, is the little Hall of the Inn, both with their great clock-faces proclaiming that they belong, though not many yards apart, to different establishments. The windows are full of heraldry, and among the shields we can easily distinguish the chequers of the Cliffords. Passing through an arch- way we reach a little court, if possible smaller than that of Serjeants' Inn, and find the hall on the north side, and three or four doors to separate houses of the greatest possible irregularity of plan, facing it on the opposite side. One of the openings admits to a The Inns of Chancery 275 second passage, and by it we emerge close to the front or Fleet Street porch of the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, feeling very much as if we had emerged from the labyrinth of a warren. As we shall see in the next chapter, Clifford's Inn has no monopoly of the beauty of the Inns of Chancery ; but nothing can be more striking to the unaccustomed visitor than the sudden plunge from the noise and bustle and hurry and dust or mud of Fleet Street, into the calm, quiet, green recesses of the little garden among the old houses behind the church. Maitland's account is delightfully matter-of-fact and unpoetical, but most accurate. Writing in 1756, he says the garden is an airy place and neatly kept, " being enclosed with a palisade pale, and adorned with rows of lime-trees set round the grass plats and gravel walks." XII THE INNS OF CHANCERY (Concluded) Clement's Inn New Inn Lyon's Inn Cursitor Street Staple Inn Dr. Johnson Barnard's Inn Survey of the whole Subject Its Architectural Features Its Associations. WE have still two groups of these dead or moribund little institutions to speak of. One clusters round the western precincts of the New Law Courts, the other is to be found on the southern side of Holborn. Before the ground was taken for Street's great new building, the north side of the Strand outside Temple Bar presented an appearance as different from what we see now as it is possible to imagine. There was a thicket, a tangle of small streets and lanes, all crowded upon a narrow tongue of land between the south side of Lincoln's Inn and the church of St. Clement Danes. West of the church was St. Clement's Inn, and I well remember a picturesque corner in Carey Street, where a house came quite The Inns of Chancery 279 down to the boundary of the Inn, and a passage had been opened by putting the corner of the house on an arch. Add to this and other similar features the fact that almost every doorway was handsomely carved in a good style, that every roof was supported on a good corbelled cornice, and that there was plenty of " egg and dart " everywhere, and it will be under- stood that one can be sorry even for such rookeries, and wish that the pulling down had not fallen on a day when architectural taste appears to be dead. There was not a tumbledown tenement in Carey Street which was not more worthy of notice for correct design than any of the great and pretentious palaces which have lately grown up on the site. The Law Courts hold up a high standard in Gothic, but it is followed by the frightful building to the north in dark red brick, which also apes the Gothic style. No wonder the authorities thought they must try Italian for the next building evidently no one understands Gothic, now poor Street is dead and so we have the great freestone monstrosity to the north of the new garden, built apparently to prove that Italian is as dead as Gothic. Finally, the more pleasing features of Clement's Inn have been pulled down and replaced by an architect who is too proud or too ignorant to be able to imitate the charming work of a hundred and fifty years ago which he has destroyed. With a sort of despair at heart we turn into New Inn, 280 The Inns of Court which adjoins, and can still admire the tender brown of the old bricks, the full cornices, the mullioned windows, the tiled roofs, and the abundance of old green grass. Let us admire while we can. How long will it all last ? The old buildings of Clement's Inn were peculiarly picturesque. The hall, with its inevitable clock, a well-designed doorway at the top of a flight of steps, red brick relieved by white stone, and all the other features of the genuine " Queen Anne " style, rendered it a pleasant retreat. There was nothing of striking antiquity about it, and the famous well mentioned by Fitz Stephen had long disappeared. But it had acquired a delightfully old-world air, and we could have better spared a better house. Founded for law students before the reign of Henry VII., it was entitled to a certain amount of veneration on account of the antiquity of a site as old as the time of Henry II. The arms of the Inn were those of St. Clement, a silver anchor on an azure field, ensigned with the letter " C " sable, and appeared over the door and in other places. Its eminent inhabitants are unrecorded. Of New Inn I have already given Stow's account, and need add nothing more. It has the disadvan- tage of opening into Wych Street, a narrow and somewhat disreputable locality, but is spacious, airy, and green when once, you are within. The old hall, the clock, of course, and some good wrought-iron The Inns of Chancery 283 railings, are the chief features of a neat but not very interesting courtyard. Westward of these two was Lyon's Inn. It was accounted a dependency of the Inner Temple, and was very small. It was opened for law students in the reign of Henry VIII., but the buildings at the time of its removal in 1863, to make way for a theatre, were very modern, although rather more picturesque in cornices and other classical features than architects seem able to manage at the present day. Coke was reader in the time of Queen Eliza- beth ; but history is little concerned with Lyon's Inn or, as some say, the Lyon Inn before 1823, when it was mentioned in Theodore Hook's doggrel verses about a famous murder : " His name was Mr. Williame Weare ; He dwelt in Lyon's Inn," and was murdered by Thurtell near Elstree. Ireland says the hall was built in 1700, "but has no one internal circumstance but filth to recommend it to our notice, since the use of mops and brooms seems to have been totally unknown to the directors of this Inn." He found a brood of chickens on the tables and benches. The other group of Inns consists only of two distinct institutions, namely, Staple and Barnard's, but annexed to Barnard's Inn is a very picturesque 284 The Inns of Court row of gables in Fetter Lane, originally known as the " White Horse." It is mentioned in many old memoirs as a place where coaches started. It was not, strictly speaking, any integral part of the Inn, but a passage led through it, by which the lawyers made a short cut to Fetter Lane and the parts adjacent. To see Staple and Barnard's Inns properly the visitor should walk from Chancery Lane through some of the labyrinth of small thoroughfares which adjoin or communicate with Cursitor Street. With a mind full of Thackeray and Dickens, and older romance writers than they, every street name will remind him of the days when these regions were thickly peopled with duns, and bailiffs, and sheriffs' officers, and every second house was a sponging house. What hero of romance was there who did not find himself in Cursitor Street at least once in his London career, and was not indebted for a night's compulsory lodging to " Little Aminadab," or some equally accommodating gentleman ? But Cursitor Street has no longer any horrors for the bankrupt and the extravagant man about town. It seems a thing incredible that the movements of the law were so clumsy as they are represented to have been in dozens of books by Gronow, Grevile, Thackeray, Dickens, and other writers who described the manners and customs I had almost said of our ancestors * ft .r -~ jpsss^.-'?- - fl\ i M1JV \ u. ,'/ - \^" * " ^'^''^^ \K'^.-eJL _ J" ;jj *^- $ f& N k->-JT-7~-T~7* The Inns of Chancery 287 but these scenes took place long since the times of our ancestors. Many of us are little past middle age who can remember the whole lumbering machinery at work. To some of us the name of Cursitor Street recalls episodes of family history, passages which saddened our youth ; elder brothers, perhaps, or cousins in trouble, aunts, sometimes mothers in tears ; and even those who have no such skeletons stowed away in their cupboards have read of them till they have become a reality to the mind. But what is Cursitor Street now ? Where are the sponging houses ? Where are the bailiffs and the sheriffs' officers ? We see only a well-built if unbeautiful street, full of prosperous -looking offices. Another turn takes us to Southampton Buildings, in the back- ground of which we see an Elizabethan terrace, a gilt gate, and a good backing of green foliage. The terrace and the railing mark the southern or Chancery Lane boundary of Staple Inn. I wish I could unravel the mysteries that hang about the origin and the meaning of the name of Staple Inn. It is but too easy to form theories and to hazard guesses. But there are certain features in the present case which, while they teach us nothing definite, cannot be overlooked even by the most unimaginative historical student, while, taken in connection with a great many minor circumstances, they go to form, or at least to suggest, a picture 288 The Inns of Court which can hardly be altogether baseless. The local names tell us that once upon a time this corner wore a very different aspect from that which it bears now. A grassy slope, a roadway at where now is Chancery Lane, some fine Norman buildings near the corner, " the old Temple," as they were afterwards called, a small suburban inn, field pathways to the Show Well (now marked by Shoe Lane) and in other directions, a wide open street in front, stretching across to the manor-house of the ecclesiastical lord of Portpool, and, above all things, a market. To the east was the deep valley of the " Hole-born," whose name puzzled Stow so terribly, and led him to invent an " Old-born." But the Hole-born acquired its name when burrowing through the deep clay of Battle Bridge and of Coldbath Fields, and was now, under Holborn Hill, about to become the Fleet. Here the stream was spanned by a bridge, as old perhaps as Roman times, and the Watling Street, emerging from Newgate, zigzagged down and ascended the opposite hill until it passed "the Stock of St. Andrew's church." Here there certainly was a market at some very remote period. It is mentioned in the two principal local names, Portpoole and Staple Inn. So far we can go by the old names, but no farther. It would be but too easy to make up a little theory to fit them, and to see in Staple Inn a hostelry by the market-place, beside the house of the The Inns of Chancery 291 Templars, frequented by wool merchants, who have left a memorial in the arms of the house unto this day, which are, " Azure a woolpack, argent." " This," says Dugdale, " as we have by tradition, was hereto- fore called Staple Hall, being a place where merchants for wool had their meetings." As early as the reign of Henry V. it had been taken by Gray's Inn for students. In 1622 it is described as an Inn of Chancery with a garden adjoining, and about that time a good part of the existing front must have been built The hall cannot be much later, but most of the court in which it stands is dated between 1720 and 1750, about which time there was what would now be called a thorough " restora- tion." The delightful Gothic door on the garden front of the hall is dated 1753. The whole of the buildings are picturesque to the greatest degree, and it is pleasant to see that the new owners repair and preserve it in the most careful and conservative manner. The lawyers sold it in 1884 to the Prudential Assurance Company for 68,000. It had been governed, according to Ireland, by thirteen ancients, which included a principal and a pensioner ; the first was elected every three years by the two junior members, and the other held office at his own discretion. If we approach from Chancery Lane by way of Southampton Buildings, we reach a gate which 292 The Inns of Co^lrt opens on a pretty terrace walk. On the north side of the terrace is the garden, laid out with flowers, having the door and mullioned windows of the Elizabethan hall beyond. Along the terrace on our right are some new buildings in a modern style, and when we have passed them there are some interesting old houses with deeply corniced roofs. Turning to the left we enter the court through an archway at the end of the hall, pausing to admire the old turret, the most perfect on any hall in London. Within the court, which is shaded with luxuriant trees, we see specimens of Elizabethan, Stuart, Queen Anne, and Georgian architecture, and the date of every feature is, with the initials of successive principals, over the hall doors. The hall opens in the south-western corner, and is in very perfect condition and well worth a visit, dating from the time of Queen Elizabeth. Sir George Buc, writing in 1631, as quoted by Mr. Wheatley (iii. 302), mentioned it as new then: "They have bestowed great costs in new building a fayre hall of brick." A very " fayre hall " it is still. In 1758, when some of these buildings were quite new, they had to open wide their portals to admit an illustrious guest. Dr. Samuel Johnson, after years of toil in obscurity, had just emerged as the famous author of the immortal dictionary, and was actually, while residing in Staple Inn, engaged The Inns of CJiancery 293 on the composition of Rasselas. "In 1758," says Boswell, " we find him, it should seem, in as easy and pleasant a state of existence as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to enjoy." From Staple Inn he removed, in the following year, to Gray's Inn, and thence to the Temple, living most of the time, as Murphy says of him, " in poverty, total idleness, and the pride of literature." Immediately opposite Staple Inn used to stand the Middle Row in Holborn, removed in 1867. Passing through it and the site of Holborn Bars for we are apt to forget that there were bars at the limits of the city jurisdiction all round, these being distinguished from Temple Bars as the Bars of the Old Temple we soon reach the modest little doorway which admits us to Barnard's Inn. When we have advanced a few yards up the passage, we see before us the little hall spanning the roadway by an arch. It is of unknown antiquity, most of the external features seeming to be Elizabethan ; but there was a lawyers' inn here as early as 1454, in which year the principal was sent a prisoner to Hertford Castle. A town-and-gown riot, as it would be called at the Universities, broke out between the students of the Inns of Court and Chancery on the one part, and the citizens of London on the other. The question, whatever it was, came to a point one day in Fleet Street, 294 The Inns of Coitrt where some damage was done by the rioters, and, pending an inquiry, the principals of Clifford's, Furnival's, and Barnard's Inns were arrested. In the face of more interesting subjects, the birth of a son to the long childless king and queen, the outbreak of a blazing star, and the first battle of St. Albans, the chroniclers have neglected to tell us the sequel. Barnard's Inn has been invaded by the Mercers' Company, who have made it the site of a new school, but the hall has been spared. A great deal of the old beauty has departed, and is now only to be found in the numerous pictures and drawings which were made year by year, for it was always a favourite haunt of artists. A fire which broke out in 1780 diminished the architectural attractions of the place. It was caused by the rioters who burnt Langdale's distillery next door, and threatened even Staple Inn. But enough is left to produce a most pleasing im- pression, and to transport the visitor, in fancy, into the seventeenth century. The hall is used occasion- ally for public meetings, and is in very good repair and carefully kept. In the foregoing survey of the present condition of the Inns of Court and Chancery, it has been my painful duty to find fault now and again. The lawyers are too much given to thinking that the old buildings of which they are the trustees and guardians concern themselves alone and nobody m .:%pfr^fwp ^~-~-~*$tfatej$i^l/fffiw$*i\ 4W^^;B'&S^^^rJSS?'ik rV < fiM. |:|*i sj" .V V, *>^;U;-:vJq;il! 8l V.ii ' X*^tv ^^L^^'fS/^.^-SQ"*".*-:* '-*} "' , w j ; T * > . - x vf^* *v > 5 i T . i % ... ^ : V'^.%MSS^ '' -- 1 L ' i^f, v,ipiK^ -^*t--*lH*>*-' _ ' - t ,---= " ;r\- -V^ : ' - "^i-^^P" ^ k is a capital one to read as a preparation for a tour in Devon, or to take as a companion on the way." Scotsman. AN EXPLORATION OF DARTMOOR. By J. LL. W. PAGE. 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