“those bricky towers,
The which on Thames’ broad back do ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers;
There whilom wont the Temple knights to bide
Till they decayed through pride.”
The little Fountain in Fountain Court is dear to lovers of Dickens, for here Ruth Pinch tripped by with merry heart to meet her lover. In Queen Anne’s time, a fountain of much loftier altitude sparkled and splashed here, and for aught we know made music when Milton and Shakespeare wandered within the Temple precincts.
It was not until after Milton’s birth that James I. in 1609 granted the whole property to the two societies of the Inner and Middle Temples; whereupon they presented his Majesty with a precious gold cup of great weight, which cup was esteemed by the monarch as one of his most valued treasures. When the king’s daughter Elizabeth was married four years later, the Temple and Gray’s Inn men gave a masque, which Sir Francis Bacon planned and executed. The bridal party came by water and landed at the foot of the Temple Gardens amid peals of the little cannon of that day, and with great pomp and merriment. The king gave a supper to the forty masquers. This masque, however, did not compare in splendour with the one given twenty years later, and already alluded to, which was planned by members of the Inns of Court meeting in Ely Place.
In Milton’s middle life the learned Selden, who died in 1654, was buried in the choir of the Temple church. Of him Milton writes that he is “one of your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land.” When Milton was in his thirty-sixth year and had published his treatise on divorce, he writes of Selden, then in his sixtieth year, whose acquaintance he had probably made, and begged those who would know the truth to “hasten to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, of ‘The Law of Nature and of Nations,’ a work more useful and more worthy to be perused, whoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice, than all those decretals ... which the pontifical clerks have doted on.” Of his well-known “Table Talk,” Coleridge observes: “There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer.”
One of the greatest names connected with the Temple is that of Richard Hooker, author of the famous “Ecclesiastical Polity.” He was for six years Master of the Temple—a position which Izaak Walton, who wrote his life, says he accepted rather than desired. The interest in music in the seventeenth century is evinced by the fierce contest which lasted for a year, as to the organ which should be erected in this church. Two organs were put up by rivals. The great Purcell performed on one which was finally selected by Judge Jeffreys of the Inner Temple. He was a capital musician, and in his case at least the adage seemed disproved that “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.”
With the Restoration and the opening of the floodgates of luxury and licentiousness, which the stern Puritan had for twenty years kept in abeyance, the Temple renewed the banquets and merry-makings of an earlier day. At a continuous banquet which lasted half a month, the Earl of Nottingham kept open house to all London, and entertained all the great and powerful of the time. Fifty servants waited on Charles II. and his company, while twenty violins made merry music at the feast.
The Great Fire of 1666 ceased ere it reached the Temple church, but it was not stopped until many sets of chambers and title-deeds of a vast number of valuable estates had perished. Another fire only a dozen years later destroyed much more of the establishment which Milton knew. Of the Inner Temple Hall little exists to-day that his eyes rested on. But the stately Middle Temple Hall, built in 1572, still stands, and is one of the best specimens of Elizabethan architecture that London boasts. The open roof of hammer-beam design, with pendants, is especially characteristic of the work of that period. The screen is an elaborate one of Renaissance work, more interesting for its age and associations than for its conformity to true principles of art. This famous hall witnessed the performance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in 1601. The same strong, oak tables of the days of Bacon, Coke, and Jonson still stretch from end to end. Viewed from the western dais, the portraits, armour, and rich windows combine with the massive furniture and carved screen to present a scene of sober richness hardly equalled outside of a few dining-halls of Oxford and Cambridge which belong to that same period. Among the eminent men of the Middle Temple whose lives Milton’s life touched were Sir Walter Raleigh, John Pym, Ireton,—Cromwell’s son-in-law,—Evelyn, Lord Chancellor Clarendon, and many others of equal note in their day.
Only one who has delved long in the biography and literature of this great age can realise the stupendous scholarship of the men of this period,—Coke, Selden, Bacon, Newton, Milton, and their contemporaries across the Channel, Grotius, Spinoza, and Galileo,—who, with the men of action of their day, make the century in which they lived one of the most significant since time began. What period since the Golden Age of Greece can match their achievements? Where on earth since the days of Periclean eloquence and wisdom in Athens could be found one spot where so much genius and learning had its centre as in the England into which Milton was born, and in which he lived for two-thirds of a century?
“We are apt,” says Lowell, “to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterises them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but those were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato.” Of the long list of eminent men who studied here in the century after Milton, perhaps none was more akin to him in scholarship than the learned Blackstone; none who more deeply understood his Puritan seriousness than Cowper; none who in boldness, love of liberty, and justice more resembled him than Edmund Burke.
Fifty years before Milton’s birth, as Aggas’s old map of 1562 gives evidence, London had extended but a little way beyond the city walls and the Strand. But in Elizabeth’s prosperous age, noble mansions and extensive gardens began to replace the fields, commons, and pastures that stretched westward from St. Martin’s Lane. One of the busiest spots in modern London, that is, Covent Garden, begins to come into prominence in London history just as Milton reached early manhood. For three centuries before his time the abbots of Westminster had owned “fair spreading pastures” here, now all included in the general name of “Long Acre.” Part of this they are thought to have used for the burial of their dead. In Aggas’s old map, a brick wall enclosed all but the southern side where the houses and enclosures separated it from the Strand. The property belonged to John Russell, Earl of Bedford, to whom it was given by the Crown in 1552, at which time it had a yearly value of less than £7. To-day his successor holds one of the richest rentals in the world. In 1631 a square was formed, and the famous architect Inigo Jones built an open arcade about the north and east sides. Upon the west rose a Renaissance church by the design of the same artist, and the south was bordered by the garden of Bedford House and a grove or “small grotto of trees most pleasant in the summer season.” The duke, in ordering the erection of the chapel, declared that he would go to no expense for it, and it might be a barn. “Then,” said Inigo Jones, “it shall be the handsomest barn in England,” and fulfilled his promise. It was the first important Protestant church erected in England. Only the portico of the original church remains, as the first building was destroyed by fire in 1795.