pretensions, shut the doctor out from their dinners. In the reign of Charles I., the doctor complained to the king that he received no tithes, was refused precedence as Master of the Temple, was allowed no share in the deliberations, was not paid for his supernumerary sermons, and was denied ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The doctor thereupon locked up the church and took away the keys; but Noy, the Attorney-General, snubbed him, and called him “elatus et superbus ;" and he got nothing, after all, but hard words for his petition.

"Retain all sorts of witnesses

That ply i' the Temple, under trees;

Or walk the Round with Knights o' th' Posts,
About the cross-legg'd knights, their hosts;
Or wait for customers between

The pillar rows in Lincoln's Inn."

In James I.'s time the Round, as we find in Ben Jonson, was a place for appointments; and in 1681 Otway describes bullies of Alsatia, with flapping hats pinned up on one side, sandy, weather-beaten periwigs, and clumsy iron swords clattering at their heels, as conspicuous personages among the Knights of the Posts and the other peripatetic philosophers of the Temple walks.

The learned and judicious Hooker, author of "The Ecclesiastical Polity," was for six years Master of the Temple-"a place," says Izaak Walton, "which he accepted rather than desired." Travers, We must now turn to the history of the whole a disciple of Cartwright the Nonconformist, was the precinct. When the proud Order was abolished lecturer; so Hooker, it was said, preached Canter by the Pope, Edward II. granted the Temple to bury in the forenoon, and Travers Geneva in the Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who, howafternoon. The benchers were divided, and Travers ever, soon surrendered it to the king's cousin, the being at last silenced by the archbishop, Hooker Earl of Lancaster, who let it, at their special resigned, and in his quiet parsonage of Bishops-request, to the students and professors of the combourne renewed the contest in print, in his mon laws; the colony then gradually became an "Ecclesiastical Polity." organised and collegiate body, Edward I. having When Bishop Sherlock was Master of the authorised laymen for the first time to read and Temple, the sees of Canterbury and London plead causes. were vacant about the same time (1748); this occasioned an epigram upon Sherlock,—

Hugh le Despenser for a time held the Temple, and on his execution Edward III. appointed the Mayor of London its guardian. The mayor, by closing the water-gate, caused much vexation to the

"At the Temple one day Sherlock taking a boat, The waterman asked him, 'Which way will you float?' 'Which way?' says the Doctor; why, fool, with the lawyers rowing by boat to Westminster, and the king

stream!'

To St. Paul's or to Lambeth was all one to him."

The tide in favour of Sherlock was running to
St. Paul's. He was made Bishop of London.
Most of his successors in the Mastership have

been men of eminence.

had to interfere. In 1333 the king farmed out the Temple rents at £25 a year. In the meantime, the Knights Hospitallers, affecting to be offended at the desecration of holy ground-the Bishop of Ely's lodgings, a chapel dedicated to à Becket, and the door to the Temple Hall-claimed the forfeited spot. The king granted their reDuring the repairs of 1827 the ancient freestone chapel of St. Anne, which stood on the south side quest, the annual revenue of the Temple then of the “Round,” was removed. The upper storey being £73 6s. 11d., equal to about £1,000 of our communicated with the Temple Church by a stair- present money. In 1340, in consideration of £100 case opening on the west end of the south aisle of towards an expedition to France, the warlike king the choir; the lower joined the "Round" by a door-made over the residue of the Temple to the way under one of the arches of the circular arcade. The chapel anciently opened upon the cloisters, and formed a private way from the convent to the church. Here the Papal legate and the highest bishops frequently held conferences; and on Sunday mornings the Master of the Temple held chapters, enjoined penances, made up quarrels, and pronounced absolution. The chapel of St. Anne was in the old time much resorted to by barren women, who there prayed for children.

In Charles II.'s time, according to "Hudibras," "straw bail” and low rascals of that sort lingered about the Round, waiting for hire. Butler says:

Hospitallers, who instantly endowed the church with lands and one thousand fagots a year from Lillerton Wood to keep up the church fires.

In this reign Chaucer, who is supposed to have been a student of the Middle Temple, and who is said to have once beaten an insolent Franciscan

friar in Fleet Street, gives a eulogistic sketch of a
Temple manciple or purveyor of provisions, in the
prologue to his wonderful "Canterbury Tales.”

"A gentil manciple was there of the Temple,
Of whom achatours mighten take ensample,
For to ben wise in bying of vitàille;
For, whether that he paid or toke by taille.

of the other societies. A manuscript (temp. Henry The attention paid by the governors of the house VIII.) in the Cottonian Library dwells much both to the morals and dress of its members is on the readings, mootings, boltings, and other evidenced by the imposition, in the thirteenth year practices of the Temple students, and analyses of the reign of Henry VIII., of a fine of 6s. 8d. the various classes of benchers, readers, cupboard- on any one who should exercise the plays of men, inner barristers, outer barristers, and students. "shove-grote" or "slyp-grote," and by the mandate The writer also mentions the fact that in term afterwards issued in the thirty-eighth year of the times the students met to talk law and confer on same reign, that students should reform themselves business in the church, which was, he says, as in their cut, or disguised apparel, and should not noisy as St. Paul's. When the plague broke out have long beards. the students went home to the country.

It is in the Temple Gardens that Shakespeare

THE TEMPLE IN 1671. (FROM AN OLD BIRD'S-EYE VIEW IN THE INNER TEMPLE.)

The Society of the Inner Temple was very active (says Mr. Foss) during the reign of Henry VIII. in the erection of new buildings. Several houses for chambers were constructed near the Library, and were called Pakington's Rents, from the name of the Treasurer who superintended them. Henry Bradshaw, Treasurer in the twenty-sixth year, gave his name to another set then built, which it kept until Chief Baron Tanfield resided there in the reign of James I., since which it has been called Tanfield Court. Other improvements were made about the same period, one of these being the construction of a new ceiling to the hall and the erection of a wall between the garden and the Thames.

But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.

"Plantagenet. Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset ? "Somerset. Hath not thy rose a thorn, Plantagenet ?

*

This brawl to-day,

"Warwick.
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."

King Henry VI., Part I., Act ii., sc. 4.

The books of the Middle Temple do not commence till the reign of King Henry VII., the first Treasurer named in them being John Brooke, in the sixteenth year of Henry VII. (1500-1). Readers were not appointed till the following year, the earliest being John Vavasour-probably son of the judge, and not, as Dugdale calls him, the judge himself, who had then been on the bench for twelve years. Members of the house might be excused from living in common on account of their wives being in town, or for other special reasons.

In the last year of Philip and Mary (1558) eight gentlemen of the Temple were expelled the society and committed to the Fleet for wilful disobedience to the Bench, but on their humble submission they were readmitted. A year before this a severe Act of Parliament was passed, prohibiting Templars wearing beards of more than

three weeks' growth, upon pain of a forty-shilling fine, and double for every week after monition. The young lawyers were evidently getting too foppish. They were required to cease wearing Spanish cloaks, swords, bucklers, rapiers, gowns, hats, or daggers at their girdles. Only knights and benchers were to display doublets or hose of any light colour, except scarlet and crimson, or to affect velvet caps, scarf-wings to their gowns, white jerkins, buskins, velvet shoes, double shirtcuffs, or feathers or ribbons in their caps. Moreover, no attorney was to be admitted into either house. These monastic rules were intended to preserve the gravity of the profession, and must have pleased the Poloniuses and galled the Mercutios of those troublous days.

In Elizabeth's days Master Gerard Leigh, a pedantic scholar of the College of Heralds, persuaded the misguided Inner Temple to abandon the old Templar arms- a plain red cross on a shield argent, with a lamb bearing the banner of the sinless profession, surmounted by a red cross. The heraldic euphuist substituted for this a flying Pegasus striking out the fountain of Hippocrene with its hoofs, with the appended motto of "Volat ad astra virtus," a recondite allusion to men like Chaucer and Gower, who, it is said, had turned from lawyers to poets.

CHAPTER XV.

THE TEMPLE (continued).

named Manningham, preserved in the Harleian Miscellany, has revealed the interesting fact that in this hall in February, 1602-probably, says Mr. Collier, six months after its first appearance at the Globe-Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was acted.

The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits-Manninghain's Diary-Fox Hunts in Hall-The Grand Revels-Spenser-Sir J. Davis -A Present to a King-Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple-Fires in the Temple--The Last Great Revel in the Hall-Temple Anecdotes-The Gordon Riots-John Scott and his Pretty Wife-Colman "Keeping Terms "-Blackstone's "Farewell "-Burke-Sheridan -A Pair of Epigrams-Hare Court-The Barber's Shop-Johnson and the Literary Club-Charles Lamb-Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and Extravagances-" Hack Work" for Booksellers-The Deserted Village-She Stoops to Conquer-Goldsmith's Death and Burial. In the glorious reign of Elizabeth the old Middle | in 1757. The diary of an Elizabethan barrister, Temple Hall was converted into chambers, and a new Hall built. The present roof (says Mr. Peter Cunningham) is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in London. The screen, in the Renaissance style, was long supposed to be an exact copy of the Strand front of Old Somerset House; but this is a vulgar error; nor could it have been made of timber from the Spanish Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before the Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord Eldon and his brother, Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty judge, are by Behnes. The portraits are chiefly second-rate copies. The exterior was cased with stone, in "wretched taste,"

"Feb. 2, 1601 (2).-At our feast," says Manningham, "we had a play called Twelve Night, or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors or Menæchmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practice in it is to make the steward believe his lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfayting a letter, as from his lady, in generall terms telling him what