Long might one linger over the Temple and its many associations. Even the names of its mazy courts recall old stories, as well as their sometime dwellers. Johnson's Buildings where the old Doctor lived at one time; Brick Court, where poor, improvident Goldsmith lived, and died, as he had lived in debt and difficulties: Inner-Temple-Lane, where Charles Lamb lodged, and wrote: "The rooms are delicious, and Hare's Court trees come in at the window, so that it's like living in a garden." Garden Court (now rebuilt), where Dickens's "Pip" lived; "Lamb Court," with the shades of Thackeray's Warrington, Pen, and Laura. Tanfield Court, less pleasantly, recalls a murder, that of old Mrs. Duncomb, killed by a Temple laundress; the murderess sitting, dressed in scarlet, to Hogarth for her portrait, two days before her execution. Then there is King's Bench Walk, where Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, came as client, and was so disgusted at finding her legal adviser absent: "I could not tell who she was," said the servant, reporting the visit to her master, "for she would not tell me her name, but she swore so dreadfully that I am sure she must be a lady of quality."
But the Temple sundials are sternly marking the time, and we must tear ourselves away from the historic precincts. The day is waning, and all too soon Embankment and gardens, river and sky, will have changed, by some mysterious alchemy, to a "nocturne" of silver and gold. Let us hasten back into the din of Fleet Street and the Strand.
Holywell Street, with its tempting book-shops, is now a thing of the past; and, for the constant Londoner, the bearings of the Strand world have changed much of late. But Wych Street still remains, and behind it is the archway into New Inn, a quaint and forsaken place, resembling, not merely a backwater, but a stagnant pool, really forgotten by the busy tide of life around it. New Inn lies in that curious and debatable region between the Strand and the district of Clare-Market; but it is so secluded that one might well live in London all one's life and never know of it. There is a certain not unpicturesque squalor about New Inn and its purlieus; it has, like so many of these places, a pathetic air as of having seen better days. Possibly, New Inn sees only too well the fate that awaits it, in the towering red-brick offices close by, that once were old Clement's Inn! "Will they 'talk of mad Shallow yet' in Clement's Inn? Alas! I fear that the dwellers in the new mansions will read little of the old traditions of the site"! "To New Inn," says Seymour (in his Summary of London, 1735), "are pleasant walks and gardens;" and still a few sickly patches of grass survive, as well as a saddened greenhouse, relic of a happier time! Yet the "dusty purlieus of the Law" still, in spite of the builder, keep up, in a manner, their gardening traditions. Even the massive new "Record Office" does not disdain its little strip of garden, and makes praiseworthy attempts to grow turf and ground-ivy borders, to refresh the wanderer down Chancery Lane.
In and about Chancery Lane are several more of these small Inns, both past and present. "Symond's Inn," so sympathetically described by Dickens in Bleak House, as the lair of Mr. Vholes, the grasping Chancery lawyer, is typical of many of these rusty and decaying nests. Symond's Inn, indeed, no longer exists. "Chichester Rents," west of Chancery Lane, marks its forgotten site; but the portrait,—slightly caricatured, like all Dickens's sketches,—is very suggestive:
"The name of MR. VHOLES, preceded by the legend GROUND FLOOR, is inscribed upon a doorpost in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane: a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn, like a large dust-bin of two compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his day, and constructed his inn of old building materials, which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond, are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.... Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning, and encumbered by a black bulkhead of cellarage staircase, against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool; while the other, who elbows him at the same desk, has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull, cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless coerced."
Indeed, the whole region of the law, in its by-ways, and smaller Inns, is altogether suggestive of Bleak House. Dickens, a kind of Sam Weller himself in his knowledge of London, knew all the Inns well, living in several of them. He is a faithful chronicler, with this reservation, that he has no eye for the picturesque interest, but is all eye for the human. Were these places dirtier in Dickens's time? That can hardly be. Why, one reflects, is there a kind of tradition in such things? even as regards the eternal cats and the equally eternal "laundresses"? (called so, presumably, because they never seem to wash!) Why are the window panes, apparently, never, never, cleaned? Has never any one come here with a love of cleanliness for its own sake, or with a yearning for clean windows, to these Inns?
See, for instance, the corner of old Serjeants' Inn, where it joins Clifford's Inn! It positively caricatures even Dickens. Black, suggestively gruesome as a picture by Hogarth; yet, amid all its dirt, still picturesque; everywhere neglect, rust, grime; windows suggestive of anything but light, broken and stuffed with dirty paper; no sign of life (it being Saturday afternoon), but one old half-starved tabby cat, moved out of her wonted apathy by hearing the welcome voice of the cats' meat boy in neighbouring Chancery Lane! Is she the aged pensioner of some departed inhabitant, and does she, perchance, hope to steal, unperceived, some scrap from that unsavoury basket? As she slinks along the outer railings of the Clifford's Inn enclosure, and across the irregular cobble-stones of the court, one notices that what is by courtesy termed a "garden" is merely a cat walk. It is a railed-in garden of desolation, its turf long ago forgotten, its gravel-paths even obliterated, a dingy strip of earth under a few mangy trees. Surely, nobody can have entered that rusty gate for at least a hundred years! It might be the garden of the "Sleeping Beauty," or at least a London edition of that lady. Poor, deserted closes! bits of vanishing London! The tide of progress will remove you altogether ere long, and build huge blocks of clean, if unromantic, "Chicago" edifices in your place. Yet, their dirt and desolation notwithstanding, can we not almost find it in our hearts to regret these London byways of a past age?
Perhaps Clifford's Inn may yet maintain some transmitted gloom from the fact that here used to live the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court, "which rendered," says a chronicler, "this little spot the fountain-head of more misery than any whole county in England." A grimy archway, piercing the buildings of Clifford's Inn, and adorned (?) by a ramshackle hanging lamp, leads through another tiny courtyard to the adjoining Fleet Street. In such crowded city byways, "businesses," and things, and people, are often in the strangest juxtaposition. It seems as if every possible trade and profession had made up its mind to live, in deadly rivalry, within the same few cubic feet of mother earth. Here, for instance, a smart kitchen, well-appointed, with shining pots and pans, looks straight into the windows of a dirty law-stationer's; there, a printing-press rumbles, cheek-by-jowl with a Fleet Street tea-shop; here a theatre stage-door ogles, at a convenient distance, the inviting back entrance of a pawnshop (both of them discreetly placed in a retiring side-alley); and there, the much populated "model" looks across, somewhat yearningly, to some cat-ridden and rusty desolation, that has got, somehow or other, "into Chancery," or some such equivalent for oblivion and decay. And, between the Fleet Street entrance to Clifford's Inn and Chancery Lane, rises, in strangest medley of all, the blackened height of St. Dunstan's in-the-West, a rebuilding of 1831, by J. Shaw, on an ancient site. Its tall tower is effective, but the body of the church has a somewhat abbreviated air, being tightly sandwiched in between the new buildings of "Law Life Assurance" on one side, and the Dundee Advertiser, &c., on the other.
The two famous wooden giants on the old church of St. Dunstan's, that used to strike the hours, are now removed to a villa in Regent's Park.
Between Chancery Lane and Holborn, many important rebuildings and extensions have been made of recent years; imposing new edifices have been raised, and, in some places, building, with the obliteration of old landmarks, is still going on, so that those who knew it in old days would hardly now recognise the locality. A new Record Office, palatial and imposing, in the Tudor style, now extends from Chancery Lane across to Fetter Lane, covering what used to be Rolls Yard; and the old Rolls Chapel is now incorporated in the newer building. In this massive structure, this fire-proof fortress, are kept all the documentary treasures of the kingdom, beginning with the famous "Domesday Book," of the Conqueror's time. The Records and State Archives of England, so long neglected, have at length found a suitable home.