"In 1842, after some consideration, the benchers of the Temple deciding that no more burials should take place in the churchyard, resolved to pave it over. For about fifteen years the burial-place of Dr. Goldsmith continued in obscurity; for while some would have it that the interment took place to the east of the choir, others clung to an opinion, handed down by Mr. Broome, the gardener, who stated that when he commenced his duties, about 1830, a Mr. Collett, sexton, a very old man, and a penurious one, too, employed him to prune an elder-tree which, he stated, he venerated, because it marked the site of Goldsmith's grave. The stone which has been placed in the yard, 'to mark the spot' where the poet was buried, is not the site of this tree. The tomb was erected in 1860, but the exact position of the grave has never been discovered." The engraving on page 169 shows the spot as it appeared in the autumn of that year. The old houses at the back were pulled down soon after.
Mr. Forster, alluding to Goldsmith's love for the rooks, the former denizens of the Temple Gardens, says: "He saw the rookery (in the winter deserted, or guarded only by some five or six, 'like old soldiers in a garrison') resume its activity and bustle in the spring; and he moralised, like a great reformer, on the legal constitution established, the social laws enforced, and the particular castigations endured for the good of the community, by those black-dressed and black-eyed chatterers. 'I have often amused myself,' Goldsmith remarks, 'with observing their plans of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks upon a grove where they have made a colony, in the midst of the city.'"
CHAPTER XVI
THE TEMPLE (continued)
Fountain Court and the Temple Fountain—Ruth Pinch—L.E.L.'s Poem—Fig-tree Court—The Inner Temple Library—Paper Buildings—The Temple Gate—Guildford North and Jeffreys—Cowper, the Poet: his Melancholy and Attempted Suicide—A Tragedy in Tanfield Court—Lord Mansfield—"Mr. Murray" and his Client—Lamb's Pictures of the Temple—The Sun-dials—Porson and his Eccentricities—Rules of the Temple—Coke and his Labours—Temple Riots—Scuffles with the Alsatians—Temple Dinners—"Calling" to the Bar—The Temple Gardens—The Chrysanthemums—Sir Matthew Hale's Tree—Revenues of the Temple—Temple Celebrities.
Lives there a man with soul so dead as to write about the Temple without mentioning the little fountain in Fountain Court?—that pet and plaything of the Temple, that, like a little fairy, sings to beguile the cares of men oppressed with legal duties. It used to look like a wagoner's silver whip—now a modern writer cruelly calls it "a pert squirt." In Queen Anne's time Hatton describes it as forcing its stream "to a vast and almost incredible altitude"—it is now only ten feet high, no higher than a giant lord chancellor. Then it was fenced with palisades—now it is caged in iron; then it stood in a square—now it is in a round. But it still sparkles and glitters, and sprinkles and playfully splashes the jaunty sparrows that come to wash off the London dust in its variegated spray. It is quite careless now, however, of notice, for has it not been immortalised by the pen of Dickens, who has made it the centre of one of his most charming love scenes? It was in Fountain Court, our readers will like to remember, that Ruth Pinch—gentle, loving Ruth—met her lover, by the merest accident of course.
"There was," says Mr. Dickens, "a little plot between them that Tom should always come out of the Temple by one way, and that was past the fountain. Coming through Fountain Court, he was just to glance down the steps leading into Garden Court, and to look once all round him; and if Ruth had come to meet him, there he would see her—not sauntering, you understand (on account of the clerks), but coming briskly up, with the best little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the fountain and beat it all to nothing. For, fifty to one, Tom had been looking for her in the wrong direction, and had quite given her up, while she had been tripping towards him from the first, jingling that little reticule of hers (with all the keys in it) to attract his wondering observation.
"Whether there was life enough left in the slow vegetation of Fountain Court for the smoky shrubs to have any consciousness of the brightest and purest-hearted little woman in the world, is a question for gardeners and those who are learned in the loves of plants. But that it was a good thing for that same paved yard to have such a delicate little figure flitting through it, that it passed like a smile from the grimy old houses and the worn flagstones, and left them duller, darker, sterner than before, there is no sort of doubt. The Temple fountain might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood that in her person stole on, sparkling, through the dry and dusty channels of the law; the chirping sparrows, bred in Temple chinks and crannies, might have held their peace to listen to imaginary skylarks as so fresh a little creature passed; the dingy boughs, unused to droop, otherwise than in their puny growth, might have bent down in a kindred gracefulness to shed their benedictions on her graceful head; old love-letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which in their degeneracy they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that did not happen, and never will, for the love of Ruth....
"Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering water broke and fell, and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her footsteps.