they lived, go to the wigmaker who conducts the Temple affairs from his little shop in Essex Court, and he will provide you with Mr. Bellot’s fascinating Story of the Temple.
Expert sightseers of course know all about it. They will tell you that Lamb was born in No. 2, Crown Office Row, and that Thackeray lived at No. 19; that Goldsmith died at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane, and that Johnson’s Buildings are on the site of Dr. Johnson’s rooms in Inner Temple Lane, and if you share their predilections you can go and peer at the actual bricks that have once sheltered these great men. But if you want to feel the real spirit of the place, unhampered by gazing at any particular pile of bricks and mortar, go to the old Temple Church on a Sunday morning.
Take any bus along the Strand past Temple Bar, where Dr. Johnson used to say that if he stationed himself between eleven and four o’clock, every sixth passer-by was an author,—and go through the second entrance to the Temple called Inner Temple Lane. Or else take the Underground to the Temple and, walking along the Embankment, go up the Essex Street steps and turn into the Temple courts by the first gate you find open, even if that means going round into Fleet Street.
The service in the Temple is an unforgettable revelation. There is no reason why psalms should not be sung in every Anglican church in the world as they are sung in the Temple, but no one seems to have thought of it, except the Temple choirmaster, who has trained his choristers to sing the words as if they had a profound meaning.
Has anyone ever found fitting phrases to describe the peculiar beauty of the Temple Church, with its carved Norman porch, that twelfth-century Round Church, where nine recumbent Crusaders rest in peace, and gleaming marble pillars support both the choir and the Round? It must be seen to be believed, but I pity the traveller who leaves London without seeing it.
In the courts of the Temple there lie embalmed so many stories of so many ages, that everyone finds what suits his fancy. You may wander as Spenser did among
Those bricky towers,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride.
Or you may choose a century later and go to York and Lancastrian times, and listen to Suffolk saying:
Within the Temple Hall we were too loud,
The garden here is more convenient;
and Richard Duke of York’s reply,