Part 9 (1/2)
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.”