Of his old Chambers here Taylor wrote with affectionate regret when he heard of the ‘bringing low of those old chambers, dear old friend, at Ten, Crown Office Row.’
‘They were fusty, they were musty, they were grimy, dull, and dim,
The paint scaled off the panelling, the stairs were all untrim;
The flooring creaked, the windows gaped, the doorposts stood awry,
The wind whipt round the corner with a wild and wailing cry.
In a dingier set of chambers no man need wish to stow,
Than those, old friend, wherein we denned at Ten, Crown Office Row.’
The present Mitre Court Buildings date from 1830. At No. 16, in the old block, Charles Lamb once lived (1800), preferring ‘the attic story for the air.’ ‘Bring your glass,’ he writes to a friend, ‘and I will show you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river, so as by perking upon my haunches and supporting my carcass upon my elbows, without much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of King’s Bench Walk, as I lie in my bed.’ In Fuller’s Rents, now replaced by Nos. 1 and 2, Mitre Court Buildings, the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s favourite, and Sir Edward Coke, the great Chief Justice, once had chambers (1588 ff.).[42]
Coke was a Bencher before he became Chief Justice and wrote upon Lyttleton. Sir Thomas Lyttleton (author of the famous ‘Treatise on Tenures’) is the first name upon the list of the Benchers of the Inner Temple.
A heavy iron gate, shut at night, marks the entry to Mitre Court and what was formerly Ram Alley. Between the North side of Mitre Court Buildings and the entrance to Serjeants’ Inn are the remains of a small garden, marked by a few sickly trees. Beyond, is a passage leading into Serjeants’ Inn, which is approached by a flight of steps, and is shut off from Mitre Court by a door, which at the present day is seldom, if ever, closed. Through this private way of his, the lines of which can still be traced, the compact and wiry figure of the great Lord Chief Justice, Coke, might often have been seen passing between the two Inns.[43]
From 1809 to 1817 Charles Lamb lived at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, a house that has been replaced by part of the ugly Johnson’s Buildings. ‘It looks out,’ he says, ‘upon a gloomy churchyard-like Court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it. I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump, when I was a Rechabite of six years old.’
‘That goodly pile of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,’ as Lamb facetiously calls it, succeeded Heyward’s Buildings, where Selden laboured. Paper Buildings were burnt down in 1838, thanks to the carelessness of Sir John Maule, the eccentric Judge, who left a candle burning by his bedside. Both he and Campbell, afterwards Chancellor, lost everything in the flames.
In Paper Buildings George Canning, the Statesman, and Samuel Rogers, the poet, had chambers, and Lord Ellenborough also (No. 6). The present block, by Smirke, contains the chambers of another Prime Minister in Mr. Asquith. The Inner Temple can boast yet another Premier in George Grenville, who became Prime Minister (1763) in the same year as he was elected Bencher.
The name of Edward Thurlow, the rough-tongued, overbearing Lord Chancellor, is unhappily connected, like that of Grenville, with the policy which resulted in the loss of our American Colonies.
Thurlow had chambers in Fig-Tree Court, the smallest and most dismal of these legal warrens in the Temple. He died in 1806, and was buried in the Temple Church.