Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/423

 386

77/e Green Bag.

dens end in the river, and that glimpse is very fresh and bright on a summer day." Shakespeare has made the gardens famous by his conception (in Henry VI, Part I) that the quarrel which led to the Wars of the Roses took place there, the disputants Somer set, Suffolk, Warwick, and Plantagenet hav ing adjourned thither, as "within the Temple hall we were too loud." In these gardens, too, Sir Roger and Mr. Spectator used to walk, discoursing on the beauties in hoops and patches, that hovered about on the green lawn. The hall of the Middle Temple has an unique fame, in that it is the only build ing now existing in which a play of Shake speare was acted during the author's lifetime. We learn from the diary of a member of that society that on Februarys, 1601, " at our feast we had a play called 'Twelfth Night, or What you will,' much like the 'Comedy of Errors, ' orthe ' Menaechmi' ofPlautus." This performance was at the Readers' Feast at Candlemas, and there on loth February last

the Benchers and their friends held a "revel" when "Twelfth Night" was again acted, in the way it is believed to have been done in 1 60 1. To enter into a survey of those living writers who are members of the Temple would be a difficult task, so numerous are they. Let it suffice to say that many of those who are now among the successful in literature are claimed as members, and have felt, like Tom Pinch, the strange and mystic charm that hangs around the chambers in the Temple. The very atmosphere suggests a thought of learning and peaceful medita tion, and one feels, in passing day by day where once the great ones trod, that their memories seemed to assume, as Coleridge says, " the accustomed garb of daily life, a more distinct humanity, that leaves our ad miration unimpaired," and thatthere is thrown around this ancient home of the Templar Knights a fame as fresh as the memory of those with whom it has been associated.