Highways and Byways in London Part 9

The Temple, so beloved of Charles Lamb, is the most widely known of all the Inns; being the largest, and in some ways the most attractive.

Its garden-lawns slope gently and pleasantly towards the river; and its quaint, time-honoured, and beautiful old squares have the added charm of a long and romantic history. For here once was the stronghold of the Knights Templars, that powerful fraternity, so masterful in the picturesque Middle Ages; and, though the only substantial relic of them that yet exists here is the old Temple Church, their memory still lingers about these courts and gateways, adorned with their arms. And Charles Lamb,--the real child of the Temple,--has, though born at a later time, invested the place with a double charm. Born in 1775, in Crown Office Row, his father servant to a Bencher of the Inner Temple, the boy, from his earliest years, breathed in the poetry and romance of his surroundings. Has not his touching description of a childhood spent here almost the dignity of a cla.s.sic?

"I was born" (he says), "and pa.s.sed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest recollections.... What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!

"Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"

In the Temple Gardens, which, mercifully enough, have never yet been threatened with being built over, the famous annual flower-shows are held. To these gardens, where the Red Cross Knights walked at eve, where the gallants of Tudor and Stuart times paraded their powder and ruffles, are now yearly brought all the English flowers that skill can grow. In May and June, the wide green expanse becomes a bower of roses; in late autumn it is the chrysanthemums, the special flowers of the Temple, that have their turn. Chrysanthemums are London's own flowers, and care little for soot; as for the roses, they are brought hither in ma.s.ses from the country, "to make a London holiday." And, surely, never were seen such blooms as at these annual rose-shows! A Heliogabalus would indeed be in his glory. Every year new flowers, new combinations of colour, of shape are invented; and garden-lovers congregate, compare, and copy. Roses will not now deign to grow in London soot and smoke; yet the Temple Gardens once were famed for their own roses, and here, where now the flower-shows are held, once grew, according to Shakespeare, in deadly rivalry, the fatal white and red roses of York and Lancaster. He makes Warwick say, in _King Henry VI._:

"This brawl to-day, Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, Shall send, between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night."

There are many sun-dials in the Temple Gardens, a fact which seems to suggest that the average amount of suns.h.i.+ne yearly registered in the City was considerably greater in the old days, when, also, possibly, for belated roysterers too often

"The night was senescent, And star-dials pointed to morn, And the star-dials hinted of morn,"

as in Poe's mystic poem. That occasion, for instance, commemorated in the _Quarterly Review_ for 1836, when, on some festival held at the Inner Temple, less than seventy students consumed among them thirty-six quarts of richly-flavoured "sack," a potent beverage, only supposed to be "sipped" once by each!

The mottoes on the Temple sun-dials are varied and curious. "Pereunt et imputantur," is inscribed on one in Temple Lane; in Brick Court it is "Time and Tide tarry for no man"; in Ess.e.x Court, "Vestigia nulla retrorsum"; and opposite Middle Temple Hall, "Discite just.i.tiam moniti."

The Middle Temple, divided from the Inner Temple by Middle Temple Lane, is the more picturesque of the two Inns. Among its labyrinthine courts and closes, the most charming is "Fountain Court," well known to lovers of d.i.c.kens. The great writer has caught the spirit of the place; where in London, indeed, has he not done so? He is, _par excellence_, the novelist of the city in all its aspects, human, topographical, artistic, historical. In a few lines, with magic touch, he gives you a lasting impression. He makes Ruth Pinch come to meet her brother in this court:

"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 into Garden Court, and to look once all round him; and if Ruth had come to meet him, then he would see her; ... 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.... 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 c.h.i.n.ks and crannies, might have held their peace to listen to imaginary skylarks, as so fresh a little creature pa.s.sed."

Then, when the lover, John Westlock, comes one day:

"Merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and more, until they broke into a laugh against the fountain's rim and vanished."

In this court, too, is Middle Temple Hall, a fine Elizabethan edifice of 1572, with a handsome oak ceiling, its windows emblazoned with the armorial bearings of the Templar Knights. This Hall was already in Tudor times famous for its feasts, masques, revelries; here Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_ was performed in 1601, before the queen and her splendid court; "the only locality remaining where a play of Shakespeare's was listened to by his contemporaries." Even in winter Fountain Court is pretty, and its ivied trellises and arches are well kept and tended; a lovely view, too, may be enjoyed from it, down over the verdant gra.s.s slopes of "Garden Court" towards the silvery river far below. Lucky, one thinks, are those fortunate beings who have "chambers" in Garden Court! poetically named, and the reality still more charming than the name! More ornate and less attractive, though delightfully placed, are the modern buildings of "Temple Gardens."

Bits of old London, unchanged for centuries, crop up continually in the Temple precincts, and recall the time when this was a city of timbered houses of tortuous, overhanging, insanitary alleys and lanes, easily burned, almost impossible indeed to save when once threatened by fire. Small wonder, indeed, that the great fire of 1666 destroyed so much of the Temple! Middle-Temple-Lane, narrow, crooked, dark, is one of these relics of the past. Here are some picturesque old houses of lath and plaster, with overhanging upper floors, and shops beneath stuffed with law stationery and requirements; the houses somewhat crumbling and dilapidated, and "with an air," like Krook's shop in _Bleak House_, "of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law." Every now and then, about the Temple, in odd and unexpected nooks and corners, you come upon the arms of the Knights Templars; in the Middle Temple it is the Lamb bearing the banner of Innocence, and the red cross, the original badge of the order; in the Inner Temple,--the winged Pegasus,--with the motto, "Volat ad astra virtus." This winged horse has a curious history; for, when the horse was originally chosen as an emblem, he had no wings, but was ridden by two men at once to indicate the self-chosen poverty of the brotherhood; in lapse of years the figures of the men became worn and abraded, and when restored were mistaken for wings!

Middle-Temple-Lane is entered from Fleet-Street, just beyond the Temple-Bar Griffin and the imposing ma.s.s of the New Gothic Law-Courts, by a dull red-brick gateway, erected by Wren in 1684; and the Inner Temple by an archway under a hairdresser's shop, which shop is inscribed somewhat romantically as "the palace of Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey." (As a matter of fact it was built in James I.'s time, and belonged to Henry, Prince of Wales; it subsequently became "Nando's Coffee-House.") These picturesque, una.s.suming archways bear the special arms of each Inn, and here, by the winged horse, a wit once wrote the following "pasquinade:"

"As by the Templar's hold you go, The horse and lamb displayed In emblematic figures show The merits of their trade.

"The clients may infer from thence How just is their profession: The lamb sets forth their innocence, The horse their expedition."

But the main interest of the Temple lies in its ancient church, St.

Mary's, where in the Middle Ages the Knights Templars wors.h.i.+pped in their strength, and where their effigies, stiff and mailed and cross-legged, as befits returned crusaders, lie until the judgment day. The soldier-monks are gone, their place knows them no more; yet, like their more peaceful brethren and neighbours, the Carthusians, their spirit still inspires their ancient haunts. The Temple Church, begun in 1185, was one of the four round churches built in England in imitation of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, after the Templars' return from the first and second crusades; mercifully escaping the Great Fire, it has not entirely escaped the hardly less dangerous ravages of the "restorer." Through a fine Norman arch, under the western porch, the Round Church of 1185 is entered. In architecture it is Norman, with a leaning to the Transition style, and very rich in decoration. Hence, through groups of Purbeck marble columns, you look into the choir, a later addition of 1240, in the Early English style, with lancet-headed windows and a groined roof.

"These two churches," says Mr. Hare, "built at a distance of only fifty five years from each other, form one of the most interesting examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English architecture."

In the Round Church are nine monuments of Templars, of the 12th and 13th centuries, sculptured out of freestone, rec.u.mbent, with crossed legs, and in complete mail, except one, who wears a monk's cowl. They are probably the "eight images of armed knights" mentioned by Stow in 1598: some few are thought to be identified. Strange, unearthly objects! relics of a bygone order and a vanished faith,--silent witnesses of centuries' changes,--figures ghostly in the twilight of a London winter's day:--effigies of warriors, faithful in the life and unto the death that they knew, recalling Spenser's lines:

"And on his breast a bloudie cross he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead, as living, ever Him adored.

Upon his s.h.i.+eld the like was ever scored, For sovereign hope which in his help he had."

Records of the severity of the Order are not wanting. Here, opening upon the stairs leading to the triforium, is the "penitential cell"

(of such painful abbreviation that the prisoner could neither stand nor lie in it), with slits towards the church so that ma.s.s might still be heard. Here the unhappy Walter le Bacheler, Grand Preceptor of Ireland,--for disobedience to the all-powerful Master,--was starved to death, and hence also, most likely, culprits were dragged forth naked to be flogged publicly before the altar. Priests, in the robust Middle Ages, did not always err on the side of mercy or humanity!

The preacher at the Temple Church is still named "the Master," as being the successor of the Masters of the Templars. Hooker and Sherlock both held the office, and now Canon Ainger is the most modern representative of the "Grand Master," that dread mediaeval potentate.

During the Protectorate, however, the order of succession must, one thinks, have fallen into some contempt; for the church became greatly dilapidated, and the painted ceilings (according to the usual Puritan barbarism) were whitewashed, though the effigies themselves mercifully escaped destruction. Lawyers, also, used formerly to receive their clients in the Round Church (as it was their custom to do at the pillars in St. Paul's), occupying their special posts like merchants on 'Change. And thus, that thorough restoration of the church in 1839-42, which antiquaries so deplore, was no doubt very necessary.

Long might one linger over the Temple and its many a.s.sociations. Even the names of its mazy courts recall old stories, as well as their sometime dwellers. Johnson's Buildings where the old Doctor lived at one time; Brick Court, where poor, improvident Goldsmith lived, and died, as he had lived in debt and difficulties: Inner-Temple-Lane, where Charles Lamb lodged, and wrote: "The rooms are delicious, and Hare's Court trees come in at the window, so that it's like living in a garden." Garden Court (now rebuilt), where d.i.c.kens's "Pip" lived; "Lamb Court," with the shades of Thackeray's Warrington, Pen, and Laura. Tanfield Court, less pleasantly, recalls a murder, that of old Mrs. Duncomb, killed by a Temple laundress; the murderess sitting, dressed in scarlet, to Hogarth for her portrait, two days before her execution. Then there is King's Bench Walk, where Sarah, d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, came as client, and was so disgusted at finding her legal adviser absent: "I could not tell who she was," said the servant, reporting the visit to her master, "for she would not tell me her name, but she swore so dreadfully that I am sure she must be a lady of quality."

But the Temple sundials are sternly marking the time, and we must tear ourselves away from the historic precincts. The day is waning, and all too soon Embankment and gardens, river and sky, will have changed, by some mysterious alchemy, to a "nocturne" of silver and gold. Let us hasten back into the din of Fleet Street and the Strand.

Holywell Street, with its tempting book-shops, is now a thing of the past; and, for the constant Londoner, the bearings of the Strand world have changed much of late. But Wych Street still remains, and behind it is the archway into New Inn, a quaint and forsaken place, resembling, not merely a backwater, but a stagnant pool, really forgotten by the busy tide of life around it. New Inn lies in that curious and debatable region between the Strand and the district of Clare-Market; but it is so secluded that one might well live in London all one's life and never know of it. There is a certain not unpicturesque squalor about New Inn and its purlieus; it has, like so many of these places, a pathetic air as of having seen better days.

Possibly, New Inn sees only too well the fate that awaits it, in the towering red-brick offices close by, that once were old Clement's Inn!

"Will they 'talk of mad Shallow yet' in Clement's Inn? Alas! I fear that the dwellers in the new mansions will read little of the old traditions of the site"! "To New Inn," says Seymour (in his _Summary of London_, 1735), "are pleasant walks and gardens;" and still a few sickly patches of gra.s.s survive, as well as a saddened greenhouse, relic of a happier time! Yet the "dusty purlieus of the Law" still, in spite of the builder, keep up, in a manner, their gardening traditions. Even the ma.s.sive new "Record Office" does not disdain its little strip of garden, and makes praiseworthy attempts to grow turf and ground-ivy borders, to refresh the wanderer down Chancery Lane.

In and about Chancery Lane are several more of these small Inns, both past and present. "Symond's Inn," so sympathetically described by d.i.c.kens in _Bleak House_, as the lair of Mr. Vholes, the grasping Chancery lawyer, is typical of many of these rusty and decaying nests.

Symond's Inn, indeed, no longer exists. "Chichester Rents," west of Chancery Lane, marks its forgotten site; but the portrait,--slightly caricatured, like all d.i.c.kens's sketches,--is very suggestive:

"The name of MR. VHOLES, preceded by the legend GROUND FLOOR, is inscribed upon a doorpost in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane: a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn, like a large dust-bin of two compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his day, and constructed his inn of old building materials, which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond, are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.... Mr.

Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark pa.s.sage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning, and enc.u.mbered by a black bulkhead of cellarage staircase, against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool; while the other, who elbows him at the same desk, has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull, cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless coerced."

Indeed, the whole region of the law, in its by-ways, and smaller Inns, is altogether suggestive of _Bleak House_. d.i.c.kens, a kind of Sam Weller himself in his knowledge of London, knew all the Inns well, living in several of them. He is a faithful chronicler, with this reservation, that he has no eye for the picturesque interest, but is all eye for the human. Were these places dirtier in d.i.c.kens's time?

That can hardly be. Why, one reflects, is there a kind of tradition in such things? even as regards the eternal cats and the equally eternal "laundresses"? (called so, presumably, because they never seem to was.h.!.+) Why are the window panes, apparently, never, never, cleaned?

Has never any one come here with a love of cleanliness for its own sake, or with a yearning for clean windows, to these Inns?

See, for instance, the corner of old Serjeants' Inn, where it joins Clifford's Inn! It positively caricatures even d.i.c.kens. Black, suggestively gruesome as a picture by Hogarth; yet, amid all its dirt, still picturesque; everywhere neglect, rust, grime; windows suggestive of anything but light, broken and stuffed with dirty paper; no sign of life (it being Sat.u.r.day afternoon), but one old half-starved tabby cat, moved out of her wonted apathy by hearing the welcome voice of the cats' meat boy in neighbouring Chancery Lane! Is she the aged pensioner of some departed inhabitant, and does she, perchance, hope to steal, unperceived, some sc.r.a.p from that unsavoury basket? As she slinks along the outer railings of the Clifford's Inn enclosure, and across the irregular cobble-stones of the court, one notices that what is by courtesy termed a "garden" is merely a cat walk. It is a railed-in garden of desolation, its turf long ago forgotten, its gravel-paths even obliterated, a dingy strip of earth under a few mangy trees. Surely, n.o.body can have entered that rusty gate for at least a hundred years! It might be the garden of the "Sleeping Beauty," or at least a London edition of that lady. Poor, deserted closes! bits of vanis.h.i.+ng London! The tide of progress will remove you altogether ere long, and build huge blocks of clean, if unromantic, "Chicago" edifices in your place. Yet, their dirt and desolation notwithstanding, can we not almost find it in our hearts to regret these London byways of a past age?

Perhaps Clifford's Inn may yet maintain some transmitted gloom from the fact that here used to live the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court, "which rendered," says a chronicler, "this little spot the fountain-head of more misery than any whole county in England." A grimy archway, piercing the buildings of Clifford's Inn, and adorned (?) by a ramshackle hanging lamp, leads through another tiny courtyard to the adjoining Fleet Street. In such crowded city byways, "businesses," and things, and people, are often in the strangest juxtaposition. It seems as if every possible trade and profession had made up its mind to live, in deadly rivalry, within the same few cubic feet of mother earth. Here, for instance, a smart kitchen, well-appointed, with s.h.i.+ning pots and pans, looks straight into the windows of a dirty law-stationer's; there, a printing-press rumbles, cheek-by-jowl with a Fleet Street tea-shop; here a theatre stage-door ogles, at a convenient distance, the inviting back entrance of a p.a.w.nshop (both of them discreetly placed in a retiring side-alley); and there, the much populated "model" looks across, somewhat yearningly, to some cat-ridden and rusty desolation, that has got, somehow or other, "into Chancery," or some such equivalent for oblivion and decay. And, between the Fleet Street entrance to Clifford's Inn and Chancery Lane, rises, in strangest medley of all, the blackened height of St. Dunstan's in-the-West, a rebuilding of 1831, by J. Shaw, on an ancient site. Its tall tower is effective, but the body of the church has a somewhat abbreviated air, being tightly sandwiched in between the new buildings of "Law Life a.s.surance" on one side, and the _Dundee Advertiser_, &c., on the other.

The two famous wooden giants on the old church of St. Dunstan's, that used to strike the hours, are now removed to a villa in Regent's Park.

Between Chancery Lane and Holborn, many important rebuildings and extensions have been made of recent years; imposing new edifices have been raised, and, in some places, building, with the obliteration of old landmarks, is still going on, so that those who knew it in old days would hardly now recognise the locality. A new Record Office, palatial and imposing, in the Tudor style, now extends from Chancery Lane across to Fetter Lane, covering what used to be Rolls Yard; and the old Rolls Chapel is now incorporated in the newer building. In this ma.s.sive structure, this fire-proof fortress, are kept all the doc.u.mentary treasures of the kingdom, beginning with the famous "Domesday Book," of the Conqueror's time. The Records and State Archives of England, so long neglected, have at length found a suitable home.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Lincoln's Inn._]

Lincoln's Inn, however, is less altered. The New Hall of the Inn, built only in 1845, nevertheless wears a sober and respectable look of antiquity; and the new buildings are already less garish. Perhaps, at first, in contrasting the new houses of Lincoln's Inn with the old, where they rise side by side, one is tempted for a moment to cry out against the modern taste in variegated brick-work; till on closer examination one finds it to be a faithful copy of the older style, only not yet darkened by age! So true is it, as Millais has said, that "Time is the greatest of the old Masters." And the smoke of London ages buildings quickly; this is one of its advantages. The real innovation in the newer style is in the windows; for, where narrow lozenges pierced the wall, now are tall, imposing bay windows, a wealth of gla.s.s before undreamed of. The great modern cry is ever, "Let there be light!" But then, we, in our day, do not have to pay window tax.

The fine Gatehouse of Lincoln's Inn, that opens upon Chancery Lane, has a delightful look of mediaevalism; it is in the Hampton Court style, and was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas Lowell, whose arms it bears, as well as the date of its erection. Here, tradition says, "Ben Jonson, a poor bricklayer, was found working on this gate with a _Horace_ in one hand and a trowel in the other, when some gentlemen, pitying him, gave him money to leave 'so mean a calling' and pursue his studies."

Here in Lincoln's Inn are again quiet, picturesque courts; sundials with Latin mottoes; calm enclosures of quiet amidst the surrounding racket. At No. 24, "Old Buildings," is a tablet recording the residence here of John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary. An interesting story is told of these chambers. The Protector is said to have visited his secretary here one day, and disclosed to him a plot for seizing the young princes, sons of Charles I. The plans had been discussed, when Thurloe's clerk was discovered, apparently asleep, in the room.

Cromwell was for killing him, but this Thurloe dissuaded him from doing, and, pa.s.sing a dagger repeatedly over his face, thought to prove that he was really asleep. The clerk, however, had merely been shamming, and he subsequently found means to warn the princes of their danger. Such a dramatic story certainly deserves to be true!

Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, though perhaps hardly rural, is still the largest and shadiest square in London. It had in old days a bad reputation for thieves and footpads, for the pillory, and also, more tragically, as a place of execution. Here the conspirators in Mary Queen of Scots' cause were hanged and quartered; and here gallant Lord William Russell died for alleged treason, "his whole behaviour a triumph over death."

The tall substantial houses around Lincoln's-Inn-Fields bear a look of bygone state, an ancient grandeur well described in _Bleak House_.

Here is an account of the mansion inhabited by the astute Mr.

Tulkinghorn, in this square:

"Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now; and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, pa.s.sages, and antechambers still remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among bal.u.s.trades and pillars, flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache--as would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less.

Here ... lives Mr. Tulkinghorn.... Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the afternoon. Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention, able to afford it."

The house thus described by d.i.c.kens was that of his friend Forster, and, no doubt, he knew it well. Very few private houses exist, I imagine, in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields to-day: and poor "Allegory" is now there for ever at a discount. The fine mansions, with their paved forecourts and ma.s.sive gate-posts, have had their day, and have now ceased (for the larger world, that is) to be. Yet it is an imposing square still, and, seen in the suns.h.i.+ne of a May morning, is distinctly attractive.

Very attractive, too, is Staple Inn, so well known to Londoners by its old gabled Holborn front. This, in some ways the most charming of all the Inns, is kindly preserved to us by the altruism of the Prudential a.s.surance Company, whose property it is, and who at considerable expense have repaired and saved from destruction this historical "bit"

of Old London. The picturesque gables of Staple Inn, its well-known lath-and-plaster front, would, indeed, be sadly missed if they disappeared from the line of Holborn. Nothing so well gives the idea of the London of the Tudors, of the early Stuarts, as this time-honoured edifice. Staple Inn, though generally supposed to be earlier, is really of the time of James I: and its crumbling and insecure walls, during the recent (and still continuing) building operations near it, have required much "underpinning."