Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/494

 Temple Students and Temple Studies. To return to the time of Coke — it is evident that this new spirit drew some share of public notice to the Templar and his doings. He began to find a place in literature, drama and caricature. There was appar ently a good deal of unfavorable criticism in the talk of the time. Being neither fop nor Philistine, he suffered something at the hands of both.

457

Street, and when business was slack, or the students in holiday humor, steel rang on club sometimes for days together. Inside the Temple, Temple law was su preme. It was a curious code, not going much further than that no bailiff should execute a writ, nor any sheriff effect an ar rest for a duel, within the precincts. It was Temple law, too, that no foreign potentate,

V

KING'S BENCH WALK, INNER TEMPLE.

By the first, who credited him with a de sire for emulation which he would have been the first to disclaim, he was held to be not quite perfection, to have in him a soup$on of the wrong side of Temple Bar. On the other hand, the 'prentices of Fleet Street who lived on his borders were sworn to an enmity which, for his own part, he most industriously fostered. Dame Saddlechop's belief that " a frank and hearty London 'prentice is worth all the gallants of the Inns of Court," was one that found ready acceptance in the merchant booths of Fleet

such as the Lord Mayor, should show any emblem of state therein, — an excellent rule which the chief magistrate, in 1668, saw fit to challenge, entering with his sword of state before him. Pepys tells the sequel : "The students did pull it down and forced him to go and stay all the day in a private councillor's chamber until the Reader could get the young gentlemen to dinner." At any other time such assumptions of dignity and independence would have been merely farcical. Those days lacked a sense of humor, and notions of farce were crude.