He then descended, called together his mock On the accession of James I. some of his hungry court, by such fantastic names as— Scotch courtiers attempted to obtain from the king "Sir Francis Flatterer, of Fowlershurst, in the county a grant of the fee-simple of the Temple; upon of Buckingham; which the two indignant societies made "humble Sir Randal Rakabite, of Rascal Hall, in the county suit" to the king, and obtained a grant of the of Rakebell; property to themselves. The grant was signed in Sir Morgan Mumchance, of Much Monkery, in the 1609, the benchers paying £10 annually to the county of Mad Mopery;"

and the banquet then began, every man having a gilt pot full of wine, and each one paying sixpence for his repast. That night, when the lights were put out, the noisy, laughing train passed out of the portal, and the long revels were ended.

"Sir Edward Coke," says Lord Campbell, writing of this period, "first evinced his forensic powers when deputed by the students to make a representation to the benchers of the Inner Temple respecting the bad quality of their commons in the hall. After laboriously studying the facts and the law of the case, he clearly proved that the cook had broken his engagement, and was liable to be dismissed. This, according to the phraseology of the day, was called 'the cook's case, and he was said to have argued it with so much quickness of penetration and solidity of judgment, that he gave entire satisfaction to the students, and was much admired by the Bench."

In his exquisite" Prothalamion" Spenser alludes to the Temple as if he had sketched it from the river, after a visit to his great patron, the Earl of Essex,

"Those bricky towers,

The which on Thames' broad, aged back doe ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride."

king for the Inner Temple, and £10 for the Middle. In gratitude for this concession, the two loyal societies presented his majesty with a stately gold cup, weighing 200% ounces, which James "most graciously" accepted. On one side was engraved a temple, on the other a flaming altar, with the words nil nisi vobis; on the pyramidical cover stood a Roman soldier leaning on his shield. This cup the bibulous monarch ever afterwards esteemed as one of his rarest and richest jewels. In 1623 James issued one of his absurd and trumpery sumptuary edicts, recommending the ancient way of wearing caps, and requesting the Templars to lay aside their unseemly boots and spurs, the badges of "roarers, rakes, and bullies."

The Temple feasts continued to be as lavish and magnificent as in the days of Queen Mary, when no reader was allowed to contribute less than fifteen bucks to the hall dinner, and many during their readings gave fourscore or a hundred.

On the marriage (1613) of the Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King James I., with Prince Frederick, the unfortunate Elector-Palatine, the Temple and Gray's Inn men gave a masque, of which Sir Francis Bacon was the chief contriver. The masque came to Whitehall by water from Winchester Place, in Southwark; three peals of ordnance greeting them as they embarked with torches and lamps, as they passed the Temple Garden, and as they Sir John Davis, the author of "Nosce Teipsum," landed. This short trip cost £300. The king, that fine mystic poem on the immortality of the after all, was so tired, and the hall was so crowded, soul, and of that strange philosophical rhapsody on that the masque was adjourned till the Saturday dancing, was expelled the Temple in Elizabeth's following, when all went well. The next night the reign, for thrashing his friend, another roysterer king gave a supper to the forty masquers; Prince of the day, Mr. Richard Martin, in the Middle Charles and his courtiers, who had lost a wager Temple Hall; but afterwards, on proper submission, to the king at running at the ring, paid for the he was readmitted. Davis afterwards reformed, and banquet, £30 a man. The masquers, who dined became the wise Attorney-General of Ireland. His with forty of the chief nobles, kissed his majesty's biographer says, that the preface to his "Irish hand. Shortly after this twenty Templars fought Reports" vies with Coke for solidity and Black- at barriers, in honour of Prince Charles, the stone for elegance. Martin (whose monument is now hoarded up in the Triforium) also became a learned lawyer and a friend of Selden, and was the person to whom Ben Jonson dedicated his bitter play, The Poetaster. In the dedication the poet says, "For whose innocence as for the author's you were once a noble and kindly undertaker: signed, your true lover, BEN JONSON."

benchers contributing thirty shillings each to the expenses; the barristers of seven years' standing, fifteen shillings; and the other gentlemen in commons, ten shillings.

One of the grandest masques ever given by the Templars was one which cost £21,000, and was presented, in 1633, to Charles I. and his French queen. Bulstrode Whitelock, then in his youth, gives a vivid

picture of this pageant, which was meant to refute Prynne's angry "Histro-Mastix." Noy and Selden were members of the committee, and many grave heads met together to discuss the dances, dresses, and music. The music was written by Milton's friend, Lawes, the libretto by Shirley. The procession set out from Ely House, in Holborn, on Candlemas Day, in the evening. The four chariots that bore the sixteen masquers were preceded by twenty footmen in silver-laced scarlet liveries, who carried torches and cleared the way. After these rode 100 gentlemen from the Inns of Court, mounted and richly clad, every gentleman having two lackeys with torches and a page to carry his cloak. Then followed the other masquers— beggars on horseback and boys dressed as birds. The colours of the first chariot were crimson and silver, the four horses being plumed and trapped in parti-coloured tissue. The Middle Temple rode next, in blue and silver; and the Inner Temple and Lincoln's Inn followed in equal bravery, 100 of the suits being reckoned to have cost £10,000. The masque was most perfectly performed in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the Queen dancing with several of the masquers, and declaring them to be as good dancers as ever she saw.

Temple. Six years after, Prince Rupert, then a grizzly old cavalry soldier, and addicted to experiments in chemistry and engraving in his house in the Barbican, received the same honour.

The great fire of 1666, says Mr. Jeaffreson, in his "Law and Lawyers," was stayed in its westward course at the Temple; but it was not suppressed until the flames had consumed many sets of chambers, had devoured the title-deeds of a vast number of valuable estates, and had almost licked the windows of the Temple Church. Clarendon has recorded that on the occasion of this stupendous calamity, which occurred when a large proportion of the Templars were out of town, the lawyers in residence declined to break open the chambers and rescue the property of absent members of their society, through fear of prosecution for burglary. Another great fire, some years later (January, 1678-79), destroyed the old cloisters and part of the old hall of the Inner Temple, and the greater part of the residential buildings of the "Old Temple." Breaking out at midnight, and lasting till noon of next day, it devoured, in the Middle Temple, the whole of Pump Court (in which locality it originated), Elm-tree Court, Vine Court, and part of Brick Court; in the Inner Temple the cloisters, the greater part of Hare Court, and part of the hall. The night was bitterly cold, and the Templars, aroused from their beds to preserve life and pro

The year after the Restoration Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, kept his "reader's feast" in the great hall of the Inner Temple. At that time of universal vice, luxury, and extrava-perty, could not get an adequate supply of water gance, the banquet lasted from the 4th to the 17th from the Thames, which the unusual severity of of August. It was, in fact, open house to all the season had frozen. In this difficulty they London. The first day came the nobles and privy actually brought barrels of ale from the Temple councillors; the second, the Lord Mayor and alder- butteries, and fed the engines with the malt liquor. men; the third, the whole College of Physicians, Of course this supply of fluid was soon exhausted, attired in their caps and gowns; the fourth, the so the fire spreading eastward, the lawyers fought doctors and advocates of civil law; on the fifth day, it by blowing up the buildings that were in immethe archbishops, bishops, and obsequious clergy; diate danger. Gunpowder was more effectual than and on the fifteenth, as a last grand display, the beer; but the explosions were sadly destructive King, the Duke of York, the Duke of Buckingham, to human life. Amongst the buildings thus deand half the peers. An entrance was made from molished was the library of the Inner Temple. the river through the wall of the Temple Garden, Naturally, but with no apparent good reason, the the King being received on landing by the Reader sufferers by the fire attributed it to treachery on and the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; the part of persons unknown, just as the citizens the path from the garden to the wall was lined attributed the fire of 1666 to the Papists. It is more with the Reader's servants, clad in scarlet cloaks probable that the calamity was caused by some and white doublets; while above them stood the such accident as that which occasioned the fire benchers, barristers, and students, music playing which, during Lord Campbell's attorney-generalall the while, and twenty violins welcoming Charles ship, destroyed a large amount of property, and, into the hall with unanimous scrape and quaver. according to one story, had its origin in the clumsiDinner was served by fifty young students in their ness of a barrister, who upset a vessel full of spirit. gowns, no meaner servants appearing. In the Of this same fire he himself observes :-" When November following the Duke of York, the Duke I was Attorney-General, my chambers in Paper of Buckingham, and the Earl of Dorset were Buildings, Temple, were burnt to the ground in admitted members of the Society of the Inner the night-time, and all my books and manuscripts,

be forged) he hoped were destroyed; but fortu- | some benefit to be thrown in on his side. But nately they had been removed into safe custody a few days before, and the claim was dropped." The fire here alluded to broke out in the chambers of Mr. (afterwards Judge) Maule.

"I remember," says North in his "Life of Lord Keeper Guildford," "that after the fire of the Temple it was considered whether the old cloister walks should be rebuilt or rather improved into

Mr. Attorney would by no means give way to it, and reproved the Middle Templars very bitterly and eloquently upon the subject of students walking in evenings there, and putting 'cases,' which, he said, 'was done in his time, mean and low as the buildings were then. However, it comes,' he said, that such a benefit to students is now made little account of. And thereupon the cloisters, by the

order and disposition of Sir Christopher Wren, returned to dancing. The Prince of Wales honoured were built as they now stand." 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."