‘Those bricky towres,
The which on Themmes brode aged backe doe ryde,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templar Knights to byde,
Till they decayed thro’ pride.’
There is nothing, however, to prove that Spenser was referring to Brick Court. The ‘Prothalamion’ was published in 1596; and I would suggest that the phrase ‘bricky towres’ might apply most naturally to the Middle Temple Hall.
Of all the Chambers in the Inns of Court rich in reminiscences of famous men, none are so redolent of literary fame as No. 2, Brick Court. We cannot, as Thackeray[32] wrote, who himself, like Winthrop Mackworth Praed, had chambers here, pass without emotion ‘the staircase which Johnson, 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.’
Not the Temple, but No. 6, Wine Office Court, nearly opposite the Cheshire Cheese, was the scene of Dr. Johnson’s famous rescue of the author of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ who had been arrested by his landlady for his rent, and sent for his friend in great distress. ‘I sent him a guinea,’ says Johnson, ‘and promised to come to him directly.... I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had 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. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds.’
Goldsmith left Wine Office Court and lodged for a while in Gray’s Inn, and thence migrated to some humble Chambers upon the site of No. 2, Garden Court, Middle Temple (1764). These buildings have disappeared. But the success of his play, ‘The Good-Natured Man,’ for which he received £500, enabled him to launch forth into more splendid apartments. He purchased the lease of No. 2, Brick Court, which still stands as he left it, for £400. He furnished his rooms with mahogany and Wilton carpets, and, bedecking himself in a suit of ‘Tyrian bloom satin grain,’ prepared to entertain his most aristocratic acquaintances. Johnson, Percy, Reynolds, Bickerstaff, and a host of other friends of either sex, climbed those stairs to the rooms on the second floor on the right-hand side (‘two pair right’), were entertained to dinners and suppers, much to the discomposure of the studious Blackstone, who, painfully compiling his great ‘Commentaries’ in the chambers below, found good cause to grumble at the racket made by ‘his revelling neighbour.’[33] And some years later the staircase that led to the rooms of that most lovable of geniuses was crowded by friends, ‘mourners of all ranks and conditions of life, conspicuous among them being the outcasts of both sexes, who loved and wept for him because of the goodness he had done.’[34] For from these rooms, one April afternoon, the mortal remains of Oliver Goldsmith were borne forth, to be buried somewhere on the north side of the Temple Church. The exact spot is not known, but as near to it as can be ascertained a plain gravestone now bears the inscription (1860): ‘Here lies Oliver Goldsmith.’ The Goldsmith Buildings, that run parallel to the north side of the Church, belong, like Lamb Buildings, somewhat unexpectedly to the Middle Temple, but they have no immediate connection with Oliver Goldsmith.
The bedroom in Goldsmith’s Chambers Thackeray describes as a mere closet, but he commented upon the excellence of the carved woodwork in the rooms. The windows looked upon a rookery, which for long flourished in the elm-trees, since cut down, which gave their name to Elm Court. Gazing upon this colony, Goldsmith, in the intervals of composing his ‘Traveller’ or ‘Deserted Village,’ would note their ways, and so recorded them in his ‘Animated Nature’:[35] ‘The rook builds in the neighbourhood of man, and sometimes makes choice of groves in the very midst of cities for the place of its retreat and security. In these it establishes a kind of legal constitution, by which all intruders are excluded from coming to live among them, and none suffered to build but acknowledged natives of the place. I have often amused myself with observing their plan of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks upon a grove where they have made a colony in the midst of the City....’
In recent years many of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar have had Chambers in Brick Court, including Lord Coleridge, Lord Bowen, Lord Russell, and Sir William Anson. There is a sundial in this Court—one of the many for which the Inn is famous—from which Goldsmith may often have taken the hour. It warns us that Time and Tide tarry for no man, and took the place (1704) of one that bore the motto, ‘Begone about your business,’ of which the story goes that it was a Bencher’s curt dismissal of a Mason who asked him for the motto to be engraved thereon.
The Buildings in the Inns grew up in haphazard fashion. They were erected by individual members or Benchers at their own cost, and interspersed with stalls and shops, with the sanction of the Benchers. The builders were granted the right of calling their blocks of chambers after their own names, if they chose, and of nominating a certain number of successors from among members of the Society, who might become tenants without paying rent to the Inn.
To this haphazard method of building, and to the influence of numerous fires, is due the devious labyrinth of little Courts, the inextricable maze of blocks of Chambers, which lie upon our left as we descend Middle Temple Lane, and which lend so peculiar a character to the Temple Inns. Pump Court, Elm Court, Fig-Tree Court, which fill the spaces between the Lane and Wren’s Cloisters and the Inner Temple Hall, owe their irregular shape to these causes, and their titles to the chief features of the plots about which they were built.
First comes Pump Court, where Henry Fielding, the novelist, and Cowper, the poet, once had chambers. Upon its old brick walls is a sundial with its warning motto: ‘Shadows we are, and like shadows depart.’[36] The great fire of 1679, which damaged the Middle Temple far more than the Fire of London, broke out at midnight in Pump Court. It raged for twelve hours. The Thames was frozen, and barrels of ale, so tradition runs, were broached to feed the pumping engines in lieu of water. Pump Court, Elm-Tree Court, Vine Court, the Cloisters, and part of Brick Court were consumed. The Church and Middle Temple Hall were only saved by the timely use of gunpowder, a device that had been found effective in the Great Fire of 1666.