On the left are the buttresses of Middle Temple Hall.
building, in the Gothic style by H. R. Abraham, is ugly in itself, its proportions, especially when viewed from the Embankment, being painfully bad. Its height is far too great for its length and breadth, and this is due to the fact that two stories of offices and chambers are beneath the Library Room, which is approached by a charming outside staircase. The Library itself, which is 86 feet long, is a beautiful room with a fine open hammer-beam roof. It was opened on October 31, 1861, by King Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, who was called to the Bar and admitted as a Bencher of the Middle Temple on the same day.
CHAPTER V
THE INNER TEMPLE
Mr. Loftie very justly observes of the Middle Temple that ‘Its Lawn seems wider, its trees are higher, its Hall is older, its Courts are quainter, than those of the other member of this inseparable pair.’ The Middle Temple has, indeed, been unkindly compared to a beautiful woman with a plain husband. This comparison, however, is far from just. For though its beauty is perhaps less obvious and has been much impaired by the ravages of modern builders, yet the Inner Temple remains a locus classicus for the fine beauty of the Jacobean and Queen Anne styles, and across its green lawn the view of the Embankment, the River, and Surrey Hills—too often, alas! shrouded in smoke—is extremely delightful. Moreover, the heart of the Inner Temple presents the engaging completeness of a Collegiate Building. The Church and Master’s House on the North; the Cloisters on the West; the Buttery, Refectories, Hall, and Library on the South; the Master’s Garden, the Graveyard and Garden of the Inn on the East, form just such a Court or Quadrangle as delights the eye at Oxford or Cambridge.
I have spoken of the Inner Temple Gateway. In King’s Bench Walk—once known as Benchers’ Walk—the Inner Temple can boast a row of typical Jacobean mansions, with handsome doorways,[41] which look upon a broad and classic avenue of trees. Nor can an Inn, which records the names of Sir Edward Coke and of John Selden amongst its members, and which was the home of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, be reckoned inferior to any in the fame and interest of its alumni.
Dr. Johnson moved from Staple Inn to Gray’s Inn, and from Gray’s Inn to No. 1, Inner Temple Lane (1760). Here, in a spot so favourable for retirement and meditation, as Boswell calls it, in a house whose site is indicated by the ugly block of Johnson’s Buildings (1851), were those rooms which have been so vividly described by the great man’s admirers. Here, in two garrets over his chambers, his library was stored, ‘good books, but very dusty and in great confusion.’ Here was housed an apparatus for the chemical experiments in which he delighted, whilst the floor was strewn with his manuscripts for Boswell to scan ‘with a degree of veneration, supposing they might perhaps contain portions of the “Rambler” or of “Rasselas.”’ It was in his chambers here on the first floor, furnished like an old counting-house, that the uncouth genius received Madame de Boufflers—received her, no doubt, clad, as usual, in a rusty brown suit, discoloured with snuff, an old black wig too small for his head, his shirt collar and sleeves unbuttoned, his black worsted stockings slipping down to his feet, which were thrust into a pair of unbuckled shoes. And then, when he began to talk, ‘with all the correctness of a second edition,’ all thought of his slovenly appearance and his uncouth gestures vanished; the knowledge and the racy wit of the man triumphed. We see the lady, fascinated by the great man’s conversation, bowed out of those dirty old rooms, whilst the ponderous scholar rolls back to his books. Then her escort hears ‘all at once a noise like thunder.’ It has occurred to Johnson that he ought to have done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality.
Eager to show himself a man of gallantry, he hurries down the stairs in violent agitation. ‘He overtook us,’ says Beauclerc, ‘before we reached the Temple Gate, and, brushing in between me and Madame de Boufflers, seized her hand and conducted her to the coach.’ To the bottom of Inner Temple Lane came the devoted Boswell, and took chambers in Farrar’s Buildings—now rebuilt (1876)—in order to be near to the object of his biographical enthusiasm. Another name famous in Literature the Inner Temple can boast. Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, was a Member of this Inn, and in 1612 he wrote the Masques performed by this Inn and Gray’s Inn before King James at Whitehall, in honour of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Count Palatine of the Rhine. This Masque he dedicated to Sir Francis Bacon, who represented Gray’s Inn in its preparation.
The grey walls of Paper Buildings; the plain yellow brick of Crown Office Row; the stock-brick of Mitre Court, the Goldsmith Buildings that have supplanted the dingy attic of No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, which looked through the trees upon the (now vanished) pump in Hare Court, are none of them buildings which in themselves can stir any emotion but repulsion, but they have a lasting charm and interest, for they are the sites of the homes of Elia; they are haunted by the ‘old familiar faces’ of Charles Lamb and his friends.
Charles Lamb first saw the light in No. 2, Crown Office Row, ‘right opposite the stately stream which washes the garden-foot,’ and there passed the first seven years of his life. ‘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 of my earliest recollections.’
The name of these buildings was derived naturally enough, because, at least from the days of Henry VII., the Clerk of the Crown occupied the Crown Office in this Inn until its removal to the Courts of Justice in 1882. The eastern yellow brick half of the row, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, was built in 1737, the western half, Nos. 4, 5, and 6, of stone in the Italian style, in 1864, by Sydney Smirke. The Row no longer extends to No. 10, where Thackeray had chambers, sharing them possibly with Tom Taylor, before he migrated to No. 2, Brick Court.