The inner Temple gateway in the Strand opposite Chancery Lane leads after a few yards directly to the Temple Church, literally buried here close to the busiest street in London. This is the famous Round Church, the chapel of the Inner Temple in which the Knights Templars worshipped, and is the only real relic left of the Knights Templars. It has stood here since 1185, one of the four round churches of England, built in imitation of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. In early days lawyers received their clients in this church. It was arranged in the manner of an exchange, each lawyer having his regular standing place.
To the north of the Temple Church is a plain slab recording that Oliver Goldsmith author of the "Vicar of Wakefield," lies buried here.
William Cowper the poet lived for years in the Inner Temple, where he several times tried to commit suicide but failed in each attempt.
Charles Lamb was born in 1775 at No. 2 Crown Office Row in rooms overlooking the Temple Garden.
In Temple Garden, best seen from Crown Office Row, you look upon the spot where Shakespeare had the partisans first choose the red rose or the white as the badge of the houses of York or Lancaster. In "King Henry VI.," this picking is stirringly told of and the Earl of Warwick exclaims:
And here I prophesy, the brawl to-day
Grown to this faction, in the Temple Gardens,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
Middle Temple is entered from Fleet Street close by Temple Bar Memorial, by way of Middle Temple Lane, through a brick gateway designed by Wren and built in 1684. Middle Temple Lane divides Middle from Inner Temple. It is narrow, crooked and dark, a survival of the long past. Here are houses with overhanging upper floors, and law stationers' shops on the lane level or below it. Off from the thoroughfare are dingy nooks and odd courts. In one such, Brick Court, at No. 2, were Oliver Goldsmith's last lodgings and here he died in 1774. The learned Blackstone lived in the same building on the floor below Goldsmith and complained that he was much disturbed on occasions when the author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village" gave supper parties that were "filled with roaring comic songs."
The turning beyond Brick Court opens on the Hall of the Middle Temple, a perfect example of Elizabethan architecture, and where Shakespeare's charming comedy of "Twelfth Night" was first performed. In the Hall is preserved a table made of wood from one of the ships of the Great Armada on which the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots was signed by Elizabeth.
Before the Hall of Middle Temple is Fountain Court, a spot seeming far away from London. In it is the Temple Fountain. The doves that drink of the water here are as tame and as faded as the dusty foliage and the skeletons of trees hereabouts. Here Ruth Pinch the sweet girl of Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit" came often to meet her brother Tom and afterwards her lover John Westlock.