"The ancient and liberal Inn of the Inner Temple provides in its Hall, and for a most moderate price, an excellent and wholesome dinner of soup, meat, tarts, and port wine or sherry, for the Barristers and Students who attend that place of refection. The parties are arranged in messes of four, each of which quartets has its piece of beef or leg of mutton, its sufficient apple-pie, and its bottle of wine. 'This is boiled beef day, I believe, Sir,' said Lowton to Pen. 'Upon my word, Sir, I'm not aware,' said Pen. 'I'm a stranger; this is my first term; on which Lowton began to point out to him the notabilities in the Hall. 'Do you see those four fellows seated opposite to us? They are regular swells—tip-top fellows, I can tell you—Mr. Trail, the Bishop of Ealing's son, Honourable Fred Ringwood, Lord Cinqbars' brother, you know; and Bob Suckling, who's always with him. I say, I'd like to mess with those chaps.' 'And why?' asked Pen. 'Why! they don't come down here to dine, you know, they only make believe to dine. They dine here, Lord bless you! They go to some of the swell clubs, or else to some grand dinner-party. You see their names in the Morning Post at all the fine parties in London. They dine! They won't dine these two hours, I dare say.' 'But why should you like to mess with them, if they don't eat any dinner?' Pen asked, still puzzled. 'There's plenty, isn't there?' 'How green you are,' said Lowton. 'Excuse me, but you are green! They don't drink any wine, don't you see, and a fellow gets the bottle to himself, if he likes it, when he messes with those three chaps. That's why Corkoran got in with them.'"
Such were dinners at the Temple in Thackeray's time, and such they were in mine. My legal studies were superintended by my friend Mr. J. S. Fox, now K.C., and Recorder of Sheffield. Should this book ever fall under his learned eye, I should be interested to know if he has ever completed the erudite work which in those distant days he contemplated undertaking,
"Tell a Lie and Stick to it:"
A Treatise on the Law of Estoppel.
But this is a digression.
Before I leave London as it was when first I dwelt in it, I ought to recall some of the eminent persons who adorned it. Lord Beaconsfield was at the zenith of his power and popularity. Mr. Gladstone, though the crowning triumph of 1880 was not far off, was so unpopular in Society that I was asked to meet him at a dinner as a favour to the hostess, who found it difficult to collect a party when he was dining. Lord Salisbury had just emerged from a seven years' retirement, and was beginning to play for the Premiership. Mr. Chamberlain was spoken of with a kind of awe, as a desperate demagogue longing to head a revolution; and Lord Randolph Churchill was hardly known outside the Turf Club.
Law was presided over, as I have already said, by the brilliant Cockburn, and the mellifluous Coleridge was palpably preparing to succeed him. People whispered wonders about Charles Bowen; and Henry James and Charles Russell had established their positions. In the hierarchy of Medicine there were several leaders. Jenner ruled his patients by terror; Gull by tact, and Andrew Clark by religious mysticism. To me, complaining of dyspepsia, he prescribed a diet with the Pauline formula: "I seek to impose a yoke upon you, that you may be truly free." In the chief seat of the Church sat Archbishop Tait, the most dignified prelate whom I have ever met in our communion, and a really impressive spokesman of the Church in the House of Lords. The Northern Primate, Dr. Thomson, was styled "The Archbishop of Society"; and the Deanery at Westminster sheltered the fine flower of grace and culture in the fragile person of Dean Stanley. G. H. Wilkinson, afterwards Bishop of Truro and of St. Andrews, had lately been appointed to St. Peter's, Eaton Square, and had burst like a gunboat into a Dead Sea of lethargy and formalism.
Of course, the list does not pretend to be exhaustive. It only aims at commemorating a few of the figures, in different walks of life, which commanded my attention when I began to know—otherwise than as a schoolboy can know it—what London is, means, and contains. Five and thirty years have sped their course. My Home in the country has ceased to exist; and I find myself numbered among that goodly company who, in succeeding ages, have loved London and found it their natural dwelling-place. I fancy that Lord St. Aldwyn is too much of a sportsman to applaud the sentiment of his ancestor who flourished in the reign of Charles II., but it is exactly mine.
"London is the only place of England to winter in, whereof many true men might be put for examples. If the air of the streets be fulsome, then fields be at hand. If you be weary of the City, you may go to the Court. If you surfeit of the Court, you may ride into the country; and so shoot, as it were, at rounds with a roving arrow. You can wish for no kind of meat, but here is a market; for no kind of pastime, but here is a companion. If you be solitary, here be friends to sit with you. If you be sick, and one doctor will not serve your turn, you may have twain. When you are weary of your lodging, you may walk into St. Paul's ... in the Middle Aisle you may hear what the Protestants say, and in the others what the Papists whisper; and, when you have heard both, believe but one, for but one of both says true you may be assured."
We clear the chasm of a century, and hear Dr. Johnson singing the same tune as Squire Hicks.