Amongst other great lawyers who had chambers in Paper Buildings, Stephen Lushington, Edward Hall Alderson, and Sir Frank Lockwood must be named.
Paper Buildings form the Western boundary of the ‘Great Garden,’ which, indeed, before the erection of buildings here, used to extend to King’s Bench Walk. It stretched from Whitefriars to Harcourt Buildings and Middle Temple Lane, and from the Hall to the river wall, and if it has been narrowed by Paper Buildings, it has been elongated by the successive embankments of the River. Always carefully cultivated and planted with shrubs and roses, it remains, little altered by the passing centuries, one of the sweetest and most grateful of things—a trim garden in the midst of a grimy town. This is the scene chosen for that great and growing Flower Show, which is one of the most popular and pleasing of the social functions of the London season. The great wrought-iron gate opposite Crown Office Row is a magnificent specimen of eighteenth-century craftsmanship. It will be noticed that it bears, in addition to the winged Horse, the arms of
HALL AND LIBRARY, INNER TEMPLE
Crown Office Row is on the left, Paper Buildings on the right. The Gardens run right down to the Thames Embankment, and are the scene of the Temple Flower Show.
Gray’s Inn—a compliment to the ancient ally of this Inn, which was returned upon the gateway of Gray’s Inn Gardens, and over the arch of the Gatehouse leading to Gray’s Inn Road. It was upon the neighbouring terrace that the Old Benchers, of whom Lamb wrote so pleasingly, used to pace. Immediately within the railings is a sundial, which dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Of these ‘garden gods of Christian gardens, these primitive clocks, the horologes of the first world, there is a delightful profusion in the Temple. Best known of all of them, perhaps, is that which is borne by a kneeling black figure in a corner of the garden near the foot of King’s Bench Walk. It was brought here from Clement’s Inn. The oft-quoted epigram, which was one day found attached to this Blackamoor, is feeble enough:
‘In vain, poor sable son of woe,
Thou seek’st the tender tear;
From thee in vain with pangs they flow,
For mercy dwells not here.
From cannibals thou fled’st in vain;
Lawyers less quarter give—
The first won’t eat you till you’re slain,
The last will do’t alive.’
Occasionally as I pass these many sundials, shrouded in the yellow haze of London fog, or scarce visible through the murk upon the dark walls of narrow Courts, I find myself repeating Edward Fitzgerald’s mot, when, after a wet week spent with James Spedding at Mirehouse, he gazed reflectively upon the sundial in the garden there, and observed: ‘It must have an easy time of it.’
Fires, frequent and disastrous, have destroyed nearly all the old buildings in the Inner Temple. Only the Church and a fragment of the Hall survive from medieval days. The Great Fire (1666), which left the Middle Temple almost unscathed, wrought devastation in the Inner. The Inn was then rebuilt with great rapidity, the erection of Chambers being left to the enterprise of Members, as before, whilst the Society as a whole devoted itself to the construction of the Library and Moot-Chamber beneath. In the fire of 1678 the old Library was blown up with gunpowder in order to save the Hall.