This paroxysm ended in Cowper trying to hang himself, but, the rope breaking, he went down to the Thames to the Custom House Quay and threatened to drown himself. This attempt, however, also failed, and friends interfering, he was removed to an asylum, where he remained eighteen months.
From Fleet Street it is but a step to the Temple, with its grey quiet corners full of echoing memories, stretching back even to the days of Shakespeare, whose Twelfth Night was performed before an audience of his contemporaries in the self-same Middle Temple Hall that still confronts us. The names of Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, John Gower, Thomas Shadwell, William Wycherley, Nicholas Rowe, Francis Beaumont, William Congreve, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Day, Tom Moore, Sheridan, George Colman, jun., Marston, and Ford, are all upon the Temple rolls and each must in his day have been a familiar figure among the ancient buildings. But Charles Lamb is the presiding genius of the place.
"I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple," he tells us. "Its church, its halls, its garden, its fountains, its river ... these are my oldest recollections. Indeed it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time, the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses. What a cheerful liberal look hath that portion of it, which from three sides, overlooks the greater gardens, that goodly pile ... confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure) right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden foot.... A man would give something to have been born in such a place."
When Lamb was twenty-five years of age he went back to live in the Temple, at 16, Mitre Court Buildings, in an "attic storey for the air." His bed faced the river, and by "perking on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see," he wrote to a friend, "the white sails glide by the bottom of King's Bench Walk as I lie in my bed." Here he passed nine happy years, and then, after a short stay in Southampton Buildings, he returned to the Temple for the second time, to 4, Inner Temple Lane, fully intending to pass the remainder of his life within its precincts. His new set of chambers "looked out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it." But fate intervened, and he and his sister soon after left the Temple, never to return. It was no easy parting, however, for he wrote in after years, "I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench.... We never can strike root so deep in any other ground."
It was when Dr. Johnson had a set of chambers on the first floor of No. 1, Inner Temple Lane, that Boswell first went to see him. Boswell wrote:
"He received me very courteously, but it must be confessed that his apartment, furniture, and morning dress were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty, he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig which was too small for his head, his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly peculiarities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk."
Boswell, indeed, conceived so violent an admiration for him that he took rooms in Farrar's Buildings in order to be near him. Oliver Goldsmith seems to have followed his example, for he went to lodge first in 2, Garden Court, and afterwards in 2, Brick Court, on the right-hand side, looking out over the Temple Garden. Thackeray, who, years afterwards, lodged in the same set of rooms, wrote:
"I have been many a time in the Chambers in the Temple which were his, and passed up the staircase, which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith—the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of men was dead within the black oak door."
A stone slab with the inscription, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith," was placed on the north side of Temple Church, as near as possible to the spot where he is supposed to have been buried.
No. 2, Fountain Court, was the last house of William Blake, the poet-painter, the seer of visions, who had a set of rooms on the first floor, from whence a glimpse of the river was to be obtained. It was very poorly furnished, though always clean and orderly, and decorated only with his own pictures, but to the eager young disciples who flocked around him it was "the house of the Interpreter." When he lay there upon his death-bed, at the close of a blazing August day in 1827, beautiful songs in praise of his Creator fell from his lips, and as his wife, his faithful companion of forty-five years of struggle and stress, drew near to catch them more distinctly, he told her with a smile, "My beloved! they are not mine! no, they are not mine!"