‘Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer
But dare maintain the party of the truth
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.’
So the white and red roses are picked and stuck into the doublets as the sides are taken, and another noble, wise enough to see into the future, says that this quarrel in the Temple Gardens ‘shall send between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night.’ And so it did, in the dreadful long War of the Roses, as you remember.”
“But, Godmother,” began Betty after a moment, “I thought we were going to be in the eighteenth century to-day, and so far we’ve been talking about much earlier times!”
“So we have! And that’s the worst, or best, of London. When a place like this Temple, is very old, the history of a great many ‘times’ belongs to it. But you’re quite right to remind me that I brought you here because, except for the church, and the Hall, and one or two other buildings, the look of the place as it is now, is much more seventeenth and eighteenth century than anything else, and is ‘mixed up’ as you so often say, with the lives of many interesting eighteenth-century writers, who lived in one or other of the houses enclosing these charming courts. You’ll know, or you ought to know, two of them, if I mention their names. Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith.”
“I’ve read The Vicar of Wakefield that Goldsmith wrote,” said Betty, “and I’ve heard of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary—but I don’t know much about him.”
“Yet he’s the man who will help us with our magic journey presently,” Godmother returned. “For the time you may remember that Oliver Goldsmith was one of his friends.”
“Why, there’s his name!” Betty exclaimed as she caught sight of a medallion on the wall of a house in an enclosure called Brick Court.
“That’s where he lived and died, and the tablet is there to commemorate him. He was buried in the churchyard of the Temple Church. Come! I will show you his tombstone. You will, I expect, read Goldsmith’s life when you are older, and find out what a lovable man he was, in spite of many tiresome ways,” she went on as they stood looking down at his grave.