Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/422

 Some Literary Associations of the Temple. No one is more embucd with the spirit and culture of the Temple than Charles Lamb, the charming essayist. He was born one year after Goldsmith's death, in Crown Office Row, in the Inner Temple, facing the gar dens, and lived at a later date in Inner Tem ple Lane. Whatever he may owe to the Temple, he has amply repaid in his essay, "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." In it he has unfolded the influence on his mind of the surroundings of his childhood in a way that suggests " how fit it was that he should have been planted there, a rare growth, nour ished by the rich soil of the past; in the one place in all London where everyday life yet keeps something like a saving grace of an tiquity." And he tells us that no verses were repeated to himself more frequently or with a more kindly emotion than those of Spen ser, beginning: — Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whilom won the Templar Knights to bide.

He has given a place in English literature to the sundials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding cor respondence with the fountain of light. What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelmcnts of lead and brass, compared with the simple, altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! The Tem ple fountain, too, is one of his sweetest memo ries, " which I have often made to rise and fall, how many times to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic." Two great names of more modern times will always be associated with the Temple, from their having immortalized it in their works, namely, Thackeray and Dickens. Thackeray began to study law in the Temple about 183 1, when he was twenty years of age, for we find that a note of his, dated Hare Court, Temple, Dec. 16, 1831, records that

385

he has just finished "along-winded declara tion about a mortgage." There is no other mention of his connection with law, though one of his letters, in 1833, is dated from 5 Essex Court, Temple. It is strange that this address was that of Evelyn the diarist. It is not, however, Hare Court or Essex Court around which Thackeray has thrown a peren nial interest, but "No. 6 Lamb's Court," the residence of Pen and Mr. George Warrington. It was here Fanny Bolton nursed Pen in his illness, and here afterwards came Pen's mother, Laura, and the major. And it was under the lamp in the Court that Fanny, after she was turned out, used to stand weep ing in the evening, listening to the family making merry upstairs with her hero. It was in the room below, too, that Miss Laura amused herself with Mr. Percy Silright's books, wig, and scent bottles. Dickens has immortalized the Temple fountain, of which he writes so delightfully in" Martin Chuzzlewit/'androundwhich shall forever cling the romance of Ruth Pinch and John Westlock. Many a time Ruth went through the square, where the fountain is, to meet her brother, and " it was a good thing for that same paved yard to have that little figure flitting through it, passing like a smile from the grimy old houses, and the old love letters shut up in iron boxes in the neighbor ing offices might have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient tenderness as she went lightly by." It was here she met John Westlock, and nothing can excel the passage in which Dickens, with an exquisite touch, tells of their meeting. "Merrily the tiny fountain played, and mer rily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face, as John hurried after her; softly the whisper ing water broke and fell, and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her foot steps." When they met on another occa sion, their steps turned towards the fountain, and when it was reached, they stopped and glanced down Garden Court, " because Gar den Court ends in the gardens, and the gar