In the Temple Gardens, which, mercifully enough, have never yet been threatened with being built over, the famous annual flower-shows are held. To these gardens, where the Red Cross Knights walked at eve, where the gallants of Tudor and Stuart times paraded their powder and ruffles, are now yearly brought all the English flowers that skill can grow. In May and June, the wide green expanse becomes a bower of roses; in late autumn it is the chrysanthemums, the special flowers of the Temple, that have their turn. Chrysanthemums are London's own flowers, and care little for soot; as for the roses, they are brought hither in masses from the country, "to make a London holiday." And, surely, never were seen such blooms as at these annual rose-shows! A Heliogabalus would indeed be in his glory. Every year new flowers, new combinations of colour, of shape are invented; and garden-lovers congregate, compare, and copy. Roses will not now deign to grow in London soot and smoke; yet the Temple Gardens once were famed for their own roses, and here, where now the flower-shows are held, once grew, according to Shakespeare, in deadly rivalry, the fatal white and red roses of York and Lancaster. He makes Warwick say, in King Henry VI.:
"This brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night."
There are many sun-dials in the Temple Gardens, a fact which seems to suggest that the average amount of sunshine yearly registered in the City was considerably greater in the old days, when, also, possibly, for belated roysterers too often
"The night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn,
And the star-dials hinted of morn,"
as in Poe's mystic poem. That occasion, for instance, commemorated in the Quarterly Review for 1836, when, on some festival held at the Inner Temple, less than seventy students consumed among them thirty-six quarts of richly-flavoured "sack," a potent beverage, only supposed to be "sipped" once by each!
The mottoes on the Temple sun-dials are varied and curious. "Pereunt et imputantur," is inscribed on one in Temple Lane; in Brick Court it is "Time and Tide tarry for no man"; in Essex Court, "Vestigia nulla retrorsum"; and opposite Middle Temple Hall, "Discite justitiam moniti."
The Middle Temple, divided from the Inner Temple by Middle Temple Lane, is the more picturesque of the two Inns. Among its labyrinthine courts and closes, the most charming is "Fountain Court," well known to lovers of Dickens. The great writer has caught the spirit of the place; where in London, indeed, has he not done so? He is, par excellence, the novelist of the city in all its aspects, human, topographical, artistic, historical. In a few lines, with magic touch, he gives you a lasting impression. He makes Ruth Pinch come to meet her brother in this court:
"There was a little plot between them, that Tom should always come out of the Temple by one way; and that was, past the fountain. Coming through Fountain Court, he was just to glance down the steps leading into Garden Court, and to look once all round him; and if Ruth had come to meet him, then he would see her; ... coming briskly up, with the best little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the fountain, and beat it all to nothing.... The Temple fountain might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood, that in her person stole on, sparkling, through the dry and dusty channels of the Law; the chirping sparrows, bred in Temple chinks and crannies, might have held their peace to listen to imaginary skylarks, as so fresh a little creature passed."
Then, when the lover, John Westlock, comes one day:
"Merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and more, until they broke into a laugh against the fountain's rim and vanished."