THE INNS OF COURT
"The perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the
law."--_Dickens._
"those bricky towers,
The which on Thames' broad aged back doe ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Templar knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride."--_Spenser._
Among the by-ways that open suddenly out of the highways of London,
are there any more attractive than the Inns of Court? which, in an
almost startling manner, bring into the whirl of Holborn, and the din
of Fleet Street, something of the charm of an older and more peaceful
world. No parts of London are more delightful, and few call up more
interesting historic associations. Picturesque and charming old
enclosures,--full of that mysterious and intangible "romance of
London" that appealed so strongly to writers such as Lamb, Dickens,
and Nathaniel Hawthorne,--the Inns of Court have in their time
sheltered many great men. How strange and how unexpected, in the very
heart of busy London, are these quiet old-world quadrangles, of calm,
collegiate aspect, of infinite peace; a peace that seems perhaps more
intense in contrast with the outside, just as the London "close" of
greenery seems all the greener for its being set amid the surrounding
grime, shining "like a star in blackest night." Historic houses,
indeed, in every sense, are these old Inns, with their worm-eaten
wooden staircases, worn into holes by the passage of countless feet;
their panelled walls inscribed with many names; their floors often
crazy and slanting as the decks of a ship in mid-ocean. Even the
so-called "laundresses" who act as caretakers and servants in these
establishments, seem as though they belonged to former centuries, and
were, in a manner, impervious to the flight of time. Many have been
the noted residents in the Inns; the most noted, perhaps, of those in
the Temple are Fielding, Charles Lamb, and the poet Cowper; Dr.
Johnson lived once in Staple Inn, writing _Rasselas_ there "in the
evenings of a week," to defray his mother's funeral expenses. Surely,
if ghosts ever walk, they must walk in these historic abodes. It was
my lot lately to search for rooms in one of the Inns (I will not
invidiously specify which). The rooms were romantic enough, at a
cursory glance; further investigations revealed, I regret to say, the
fact that romance was depressingly dark, as well as unduly favourable
to rats, mice, and the unholy black-beetle; to say nothing of a
general and indescribable musty smell.
"How long have these rooms been vacant?" I inquired, with some faint
show of cheerfulness, of the frowsy "laundress," a Dickensy lady with
an appalling squint and a husky voice suggestive of the bottle.
"W'y, not to say long, 'm. On'y a year come nex' Wensday. Though not
to deceive you 'm, the larst gempleman as lived 'ere, 'e give the
place a bad name."
"What did he do?" I inquired, startled.
"W'y, 'e had the 'orrors dreadful; 'e did away with 'isself; _that's
where it is_" (with increased huskiness).
I looked tremblingly at the panelled walls, the blackened ceiling, the
faded carpet. Was it fancy, or did I see a darker patch in the
threadbare web, and the shadow of a dusky Roman pointing from the
ceiling (as in Dickens's murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn) threateningly at
that darker stain? "'Orrors"! I thought; and no wonder! Romance, rats,
and old panelling are, no doubt, beautiful in their way; but hardly
suitable to prosaic, everyday life.
It is, perhaps, in these old Inns, that, more than anywhere else in
London, the past is linked with the present. Much the same did they
look, their red brick perhaps a trifle less charmingly darkened by
time, in the days when fair ladies and gallant gentlemen walked in
their green plots, the ladies in the quaint clinging dresses of the
Georgian era, the gentlemen in the gay lace ruffles and knee-breeches
of that picturesque period in dress. If London stones could speak,
what stories could they tell! The old elm trees, planted by Bacon
(Lord Verulam) that shade so charmingly the cool green sward of Gray's
Inn, were comparatively youthful when Mr. Pepys walked with his
lady-wife in that historic enclosure "to observe the fashions of the
ladies, because of my wife making some clothes." Time enough, surely,
for the trees to have developed a quite Wordsworthian seriousness!
There were many rooks in these gardens; but these have lately
disappeared, owing, thinks Mr. Hare, "to the erection of a corrugated
iron building near them some years ago"! Possibly Mr. Hare credits the
rooks with an aesthetic feeling for beauty!
Charles Lamb, that "small, spare man in black,"--who, with his saddest
of life-histories, his patient devotion and fortitude, ill deserved
Carlyle's crude vituperation,--was a great devotee of the Inns, and
especially of the Temple, his birthplace. It was in Little Queen
Street, off Holborn, that the early tragedy happened that saddened all
his life; the murder of his mother by the hand of his dearly-loved
sister, in a fit of insanity. After this terrible occurrence, the
brother took his sister Mary into his charge, never after to part from
her, except only for her occasional necessary periods of restraint in
an asylum. In Colebrook Row, Islington, where Lamb retired on his
emancipation from the India Office, was the last abode of this devoted
couple; and here occurred the pathetic incident recorded by a friend,
that of the brother and sister walking across the fields towards the
safety of the neighbouring asylum, hand-in-hand, like two children,
and weeping bitterly.
[Illustration: _Pepys and his Wife._]
The Temple, so beloved of Charles Lamb, is the most widely known of
all the Inns; being the largest, and in some ways the most attractive.
Its garden-lawns slope gently and pleasantly towards the river; and
its quaint, time-honoured, and beautiful old squares have the added
charm of a long and romantic history. For here once was the stronghold
of the Knights Templars, that powerful fraternity, so masterful in the
picturesque Middle Ages; and, though the only substantial relic of
them that yet exists here is the old Temple Church, their memory still
lingers about these courts and gateways, adorned with their arms. And
Charles Lamb,--the real child of the Temple,--has, though born at a
later time, invested the place with a double charm. Born in 1775, in
Crown Office Row, his father servant to a Bencher of the Inner Temple,
the boy, from his earliest years, breathed in the poetry and romance
of his surroundings. Has not his touching description of a childhood
spent here almost the dignity of a classic?
"I was born" (he says), "and passed the first seven years of
my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens,
its fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those
young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream
that watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest
recollections.... What an antique air had the now almost
effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming
coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take
their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven,
holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would
the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of
childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice
as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!
"Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"
In the Temple Gardens, which, mercifully enough, have never yet been
threatened with being built over, the famous annual flower-shows are
held. To these gardens, where the Red Cross Knights walked at eve,
where the gallants of Tudor and Stuart times paraded their powder and
ruffles, are now yearly brought all the English flowers that skill can
grow. In May and June, the wide green expanse becomes a bower of
roses; in late autumn it is the chrysanthemums, the special flowers of
the Temple, that have their turn. Chrysanthemums are London's own
flowers, and care little for soot; as for the roses, they are brought
hither in masses from the country, "to make a London holiday." And,
surely, never were seen such blooms as at these annual rose-shows! A
Heliogabalus would indeed be in his glory. Every year new flowers, new
combinations of colour, of shape are invented; and garden-lovers
congregate, compare, and copy. Roses will not now deign to grow in
London soot and smoke; yet the Temple Gardens once were famed for
their own roses, and here, where now the flower-shows are held, once
grew, according to Shakespeare, in deadly rivalry, the fatal white and
red roses of York and Lancaster. He makes Warwick say, in _King Henry
VI._:
"This brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night."
There are many sun-dials in the Temple Gardens, a fact which seems to
suggest that the average amount of sunshine yearly registered in the
City was considerably greater in the old days, when, also, possibly,
for belated roysterers too often
"The night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn,
And the star-dials hinted of morn,"
as in Poe's mystic poem. That occasion, for instance, commemorated in
the _Quarterly Review_ for 1836, when, on some festival held at the
Inner Temple, less than seventy students consumed among them
thirty-six quarts of richly-flavoured "sack," a potent beverage, only
supposed to be "sipped" once by each!
The mottoes on the Temple sun-dials are varied and curious. "Pereunt
et imputantur," is inscribed on one in Temple Lane; in Brick Court it
is "Time and Tide tarry for no man"; in Essex Court, "Vestigia nulla
retrorsum"; and opposite Middle Temple Hall, "Discite justitiam
moniti."
The Middle Temple, divided from the Inner Temple by Middle Temple
Lane, is the more picturesque of the two Inns. Among its labyrinthine
courts and closes, the most charming is "Fountain Court," well known
to lovers of Dickens. The great writer has caught the spirit of the
place; where in London, indeed, has he not done so? He is, _par
excellence_, the novelist of the city in all its aspects, human,
topographical, artistic, historical. In a few lines, with magic touch,
he gives you a lasting impression. He makes Ruth Pinch come to meet
her brother in this court:
"There was 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, then
he would see her; ... 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.... 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."
Then, when the lover, John Westlock, comes one day:
"Merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the
smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and more, until
they broke into a laugh against the fountain's rim and
vanished."
In this court, too, is Middle Temple Hall, a fine Elizabethan edifice
of 1572, with a handsome oak ceiling, its windows emblazoned with the
armorial bearings of the Templar Knights. This Hall was already in
Tudor times famous for its feasts, masques, revelries; here
Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_ was performed in 1601, before the queen
and her splendid court; "the only locality remaining where a play of
Shakespeare's was listened to by his contemporaries." Even in winter
Fountain Court is pretty, and its ivied trellises and arches are well
kept and tended; a lovely view, too, may be enjoyed from it, down over
the verdant grass slopes of "Garden Court" towards the silvery river
far below. Lucky, one thinks, are those fortunate beings who have
"chambers" in Garden Court! poetically named, and the reality still
more charming than the name! More ornate and less attractive, though
delightfully placed, are the modern buildings of "Temple Gardens."
Bits of old London, unchanged for centuries, crop up continually in
the Temple precincts, and recall the time when this was a city of
timbered houses of tortuous, overhanging, insanitary alleys and lanes,
easily burned, almost impossible indeed to save when once threatened
by fire. Small wonder, indeed, that the great fire of 1666 destroyed
so much of the Temple! Middle-Temple-Lane, narrow, crooked, dark, is
one of these relics of the past. Here are some picturesque old houses
of lath and plaster, with overhanging upper floors, and shops beneath
stuffed with law stationery and requirements; the houses somewhat
crumbling and dilapidated, and "with an air," like Krook's shop in
_Bleak House_, "of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it
were a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law." Every now
and then, about the Temple, in odd and unexpected nooks and corners,
you come upon the arms of the Knights Templars; in the Middle Temple
it is the Lamb bearing the banner of Innocence, and the red cross, the
original badge of the order; in the Inner Temple,--the winged
Pegasus,--with the motto, "Volat ad astra virtus." This winged horse
has a curious history; for, when the horse was originally chosen as an
emblem, he had no wings, but was ridden by two men at once to indicate
the self-chosen poverty of the brotherhood; in lapse of years the
figures of the men became worn and abraded, and when restored were
mistaken for wings!
Middle-Temple-Lane is entered from Fleet-Street, just beyond the
Temple-Bar Griffin and the imposing mass of the New Gothic Law-Courts,
by a dull red-brick gateway, erected by Wren in 1684; and the Inner
Temple by an archway under a hairdresser's shop, which shop is
inscribed somewhat romantically as "the palace of Henry VIII. and
Cardinal Wolsey." (As a matter of fact it was built in James I.'s
time, and belonged to Henry, Prince of Wales; it subsequently became
"Nando's Coffee-House.") These picturesque, unassuming archways bear
the special arms of each Inn, and here, by the winged horse, a wit
once wrote the following "pasquinade:"
"As by the Templar's hold you go,
The horse and lamb displayed
In emblematic figures show
The merits of their trade.
"The clients may infer from thence
How just is their profession:
The lamb sets forth their innocence,
The horse their expedition."
But the main interest of the Temple lies in its ancient church, St.
Mary's, where in the Middle Ages the Knights Templars worshipped in
their strength, and where their effigies, stiff and mailed and
cross-legged, as befits returned crusaders, lie until the judgment
day. The soldier-monks are gone, their place knows them no more; yet,
like their more peaceful brethren and neighbours, the Carthusians,
their spirit still inspires their ancient haunts. The Temple Church,
begun in 1185, was one of the four round churches built in England in
imitation of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem,
after the Templars' return from the first and second crusades;
mercifully escaping the Great Fire, it has not entirely escaped the
hardly less dangerous ravages of the "restorer." Through a fine Norman
arch, under the western porch, the Round Church of 1185 is entered. In
architecture it is Norman, with a leaning to the Transition style, and
very rich in decoration. Hence, through groups of Purbeck marble
columns, you look into the choir, a later addition of 1240, in the
Early English style, with lancet-headed windows and a groined roof.
"These two churches," says Mr. Hare, "built at a distance of only
fifty five years from each other, form one of the most interesting
examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English
architecture."
In the Round Church are nine monuments of Templars, of the 12th and
13th centuries, sculptured out of freestone, recumbent, with crossed
legs, and in complete mail, except one, who wears a monk's cowl. They
are probably the "eight images of armed knights" mentioned by Stow in
1598: some few are thought to be identified. Strange, unearthly
objects! relics of a bygone order and a vanished faith,--silent
witnesses of centuries' changes,--figures ghostly in the twilight of a
London winter's day:--effigies of warriors, faithful in the life and
unto the death that they knew, recalling Spenser's lines:
"And on his breast a bloudie cross he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living, ever Him adored.
Upon his shield the like was ever scored,
For sovereign hope which in his help he had."
Records of the severity of the Order are not wanting. Here, opening
upon the stairs leading to the triforium, is the "penitential cell"
(of such painful abbreviation that the prisoner could neither stand
nor lie in it), with slits towards the church so that mass might still
be heard. Here the unhappy Walter le Bacheler, Grand Preceptor of
Ireland,--for disobedience to the all-powerful Master,--was starved to
death, and hence also, most likely, culprits were dragged forth naked
to be flogged publicly before the altar. Priests, in the robust Middle
Ages, did not always err on the side of mercy or humanity!
The preacher at the Temple Church is still named "the Master," as
being the successor of the Masters of the Templars. Hooker and
Sherlock both held the office, and now Canon Ainger is the most modern
representative of the "Grand Master," that dread mediaeval potentate.
During the Protectorate, however, the order of succession must, one
thinks, have fallen into some contempt; for the church became greatly
dilapidated, and the painted ceilings (according to the usual Puritan
barbarism) were whitewashed, though the effigies themselves mercifully
escaped destruction. Lawyers, also, used formerly to receive their
clients in the Round Church (as it was their custom to do at the
pillars in St. Paul's), occupying their special posts like merchants
on 'Change. And thus, that thorough restoration of the church in
1839-42, which antiquaries so deplore, was no doubt very necessary.
Long might one linger over the Temple and its many associations. Even
the names of its mazy courts recall old stories, as well as their
sometime dwellers. Johnson's Buildings where the old Doctor lived at
one time; Brick Court, where poor, improvident Goldsmith lived, and
died, as he had lived in debt and difficulties: Inner-Temple-Lane,
where Charles Lamb lodged, and wrote: "The rooms are delicious, and
Hare's Court trees come in at the window, so that it's like living in
a garden." Garden Court (now rebuilt), where Dickens's "Pip" lived;
"Lamb Court," with the shades of Thackeray's Warrington, Pen, and
Laura. Tanfield Court, less pleasantly, recalls a murder, that of old
Mrs. Duncomb, killed by a Temple laundress; the murderess sitting,
dressed in scarlet, to Hogarth for her portrait, two days before her
execution. Then there is King's Bench Walk, where Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough, came as client, and was so disgusted at finding her legal
adviser absent: "I could not tell who she was," said the servant,
reporting the visit to her master, "for she would not tell me her
name, but she swore so dreadfully that I am sure she must be a lady of
quality."
But the Temple sundials are sternly marking the time, and we must tear
ourselves away from the historic precincts. The day is waning, and all
too soon Embankment and gardens, river and sky, will have changed, by
some mysterious alchemy, to a "nocturne" of silver and gold. Let us
hasten back into the din of Fleet Street and the Strand.
Holywell Street, with its tempting book-shops, is now a thing of the
past; and, for the constant Londoner, the bearings of the Strand world
have changed much of late. But Wych Street still remains, and behind
it is the archway into New Inn, a quaint and forsaken place,
resembling, not merely a backwater, but a stagnant pool, really
forgotten by the busy tide of life around it. New Inn lies in that
curious and debatable region between the Strand and the district of
Clare-Market; but it is so secluded that one might well live in London
all one's life and never know of it. There is a certain not
unpicturesque squalor about New Inn and its purlieus; it has, like so
many of these places, a pathetic air as of having seen better days.
Possibly, New Inn sees only too well the fate that awaits it, in the
towering red-brick offices close by, that once were old Clement's Inn!
"Will they 'talk of mad Shallow yet' in Clement's Inn? Alas! I fear
that the dwellers in the new mansions will read little of the old
traditions of the site"! "To New Inn," says Seymour (in his _Summary
of London_, 1735), "are pleasant walks and gardens;" and still a few
sickly patches of grass survive, as well as a saddened greenhouse,
relic of a happier time! Yet the "dusty purlieus of the Law" still, in
spite of the builder, keep up, in a manner, their gardening
traditions. Even the massive new "Record Office" does not disdain its
little strip of garden, and makes praiseworthy attempts to grow turf
and ground-ivy borders, to refresh the wanderer down Chancery Lane.
In and about Chancery Lane are several more of these small Inns, both
past and present. "Symond's Inn," so sympathetically described by
Dickens in _Bleak House_, as the lair of Mr. Vholes, the grasping
Chancery lawyer, is typical of many of these rusty and decaying nests.
Symond's Inn, indeed, no longer exists. "Chichester Rents," west of
Chancery Lane, marks its forgotten site; but the portrait,--slightly
caricatured, like all Dickens's sketches,--is very suggestive:
"The name of MR. VHOLES, preceded by the legend GROUND
FLOOR, is inscribed upon a doorpost in Symond's Inn,
Chancery Lane: a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn,
like a large dust-bin of two compartments and a sifter. It
looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his day, and
constructed his inn of old building materials, which took
kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying
and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial
shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative
of Symond, are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.... Mr.
Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation
retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead
wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the
client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle
profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning, and
encumbered by a black bulkhead of cellarage staircase,
against which belated civilians generally strike their
brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that
one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool;
while the other, who elbows him at the same desk, has equal
facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome
sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is
referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of
mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment
forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is
otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or
whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys
smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot
everywhere, and the dull, cracked windows in their heavy
frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a
determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless
coerced."
Indeed, the whole region of the law, in its by-ways, and smaller Inns,
is altogether suggestive of _Bleak House_. Dickens, a kind of Sam
Weller himself in his knowledge of London, knew all the Inns well,
living in several of them. He is a faithful chronicler, with this
reservation, that he has no eye for the picturesque interest, but is
all eye for the human. Were these places dirtier in Dickens's time?
That can hardly be. Why, one reflects, is there a kind of tradition in
such things? even as regards the eternal cats and the equally eternal
"laundresses"? (called so, presumably, because they never seem to
wash!) Why are the window panes, apparently, never, never, cleaned?
Has never any one come here with a love of cleanliness for its own
sake, or with a yearning for clean windows, to these Inns?
See, for instance, the corner of old Serjeants' Inn, where it joins
Clifford's Inn! It positively caricatures even Dickens. Black,
suggestively gruesome as a picture by Hogarth; yet, amid all its dirt,
still picturesque; everywhere neglect, rust, grime; windows suggestive
of anything but light, broken and stuffed with dirty paper; no sign of
life (it being Saturday afternoon), but one old half-starved tabby
cat, moved out of her wonted apathy by hearing the welcome voice of
the cats' meat boy in neighbouring Chancery Lane! Is she the aged
pensioner of some departed inhabitant, and does she, perchance, hope
to steal, unperceived, some scrap from that unsavoury basket? As she
slinks along the outer railings of the Clifford's Inn enclosure, and
across the irregular cobble-stones of the court, one notices that what
is by courtesy termed a "garden" is merely a cat walk. It is a
railed-in garden of desolation, its turf long ago forgotten, its
gravel-paths even obliterated, a dingy strip of earth under a few
mangy trees. Surely, nobody can have entered that rusty gate for at
least a hundred years! It might be the garden of the "Sleeping
Beauty," or at least a London edition of that lady. Poor, deserted
closes! bits of vanishing London! The tide of progress will remove you
altogether ere long, and build huge blocks of clean, if unromantic,
"Chicago" edifices in your place. Yet, their dirt and desolation
notwithstanding, can we not almost find it in our hearts to regret
these London byways of a past age?
Perhaps Clifford's Inn may yet maintain some transmitted gloom from
the fact that here used to live the six attorneys of the Marshalsea
Court, "which rendered," says a chronicler, "this little spot the
fountain-head of more misery than any whole county in England." A
grimy archway, piercing the buildings of Clifford's Inn, and adorned
(?) by a ramshackle hanging lamp, leads through another tiny courtyard
to the adjoining Fleet Street. In such crowded city byways,
"businesses," and things, and people, are often in the strangest
juxtaposition. It seems as if every possible trade and profession had
made up its mind to live, in deadly rivalry, within the same few cubic
feet of mother earth. Here, for instance, a smart kitchen,
well-appointed, with shining pots and pans, looks straight into the
windows of a dirty law-stationer's; there, a printing-press rumbles,
cheek-by-jowl with a Fleet Street tea-shop; here a theatre stage-door
ogles, at a convenient distance, the inviting back entrance of a
pawnshop (both of them discreetly placed in a retiring side-alley);
and there, the much populated "model" looks across, somewhat
yearningly, to some cat-ridden and rusty desolation, that has got,
somehow or other, "into Chancery," or some such equivalent for
oblivion and decay. And, between the Fleet Street entrance to
Clifford's Inn and Chancery Lane, rises, in strangest medley of all,
the blackened height of St. Dunstan's in-the-West, a rebuilding of
1831, by J. Shaw, on an ancient site. Its tall tower is effective, but
the body of the church has a somewhat abbreviated air, being tightly
sandwiched in between the new buildings of "Law Life Assurance" on one
side, and the _Dundee Advertiser_, &c., on the other.
The two famous wooden giants on the old church of St. Dunstan's, that
used to strike the hours, are now removed to a villa in Regent's Park.
Between Chancery Lane and Holborn, many important rebuildings and
extensions have been made of recent years; imposing new edifices have
been raised, and, in some places, building, with the obliteration of
old landmarks, is still going on, so that those who knew it in old
days would hardly now recognise the locality. A new Record Office,
palatial and imposing, in the Tudor style, now extends from Chancery
Lane across to Fetter Lane, covering what used to be Rolls Yard; and
the old Rolls Chapel is now incorporated in the newer building. In
this massive structure, this fire-proof fortress, are kept all the
documentary treasures of the kingdom, beginning with the famous
"Domesday Book," of the Conqueror's time. The Records and State
Archives of England, so long neglected, have at length found a
suitable home.
[Illustration: _Lincoln's Inn._]
Lincoln's Inn, however, is less altered. The New Hall of the Inn,
built only in 1845, nevertheless wears a sober and respectable look of
antiquity; and the new buildings are already less garish. Perhaps, at
first, in contrasting the new houses of Lincoln's Inn with the old,
where they rise side by side, one is tempted for a moment to cry out
against the modern taste in variegated brick-work; till on closer
examination one finds it to be a faithful copy of the older style,
only not yet darkened by age! So true is it, as Millais has said, that
"Time is the greatest of the old Masters." And the smoke of London
ages buildings quickly; this is one of its advantages. The real
innovation in the newer style is in the windows; for, where narrow
lozenges pierced the wall, now are tall, imposing bay windows, a
wealth of glass before undreamed of. The great modern cry is ever,
"Let there be light!" But then, we, in our day, do not have to pay
window tax.
The fine Gatehouse of Lincoln's Inn, that opens upon Chancery Lane,
has a delightful look of mediaevalism; it is in the Hampton Court
style, and was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas Lowell, whose arms it
bears, as well as the date of its erection. Here, tradition says, "Ben
Jonson, a poor bricklayer, was found working on this gate with a
_Horace_ in one hand and a trowel in the other, when some gentlemen,
pitying him, gave him money to leave 'so mean a calling' and pursue
his studies."
Here in Lincoln's Inn are again quiet, picturesque courts; sundials
with Latin mottoes; calm enclosures of quiet amidst the surrounding
racket. At No. 24, "Old Buildings," is a tablet recording the
residence here of John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary. An interesting
story is told of these chambers. The Protector is said to have visited
his secretary here one day, and disclosed to him a plot for seizing
the young princes, sons of Charles I. The plans had been discussed,
when Thurloe's clerk was discovered, apparently asleep, in the room.
Cromwell was for killing him, but this Thurloe dissuaded him from
doing, and, passing a dagger repeatedly over his face, thought to
prove that he was really asleep. The clerk, however, had merely been
shamming, and he subsequently found means to warn the princes of their
danger. Such a dramatic story certainly deserves to be true!
Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, though perhaps hardly rural, is still the
largest and shadiest square in London. It had in old days a bad
reputation for thieves and footpads, for the pillory, and also, more
tragically, as a place of execution. Here the conspirators in Mary
Queen of Scots' cause were hanged and quartered; and here gallant Lord
William Russell died for alleged treason, "his whole behaviour a
triumph over death."
The tall substantial houses around Lincoln's-Inn-Fields bear a look of
bygone state, an ancient grandeur well described in _Bleak House_.
Here is an account of the mansion inhabited by the astute Mr.
Tulkinghorn, in this square:
"Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives
Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now; and
in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie
like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages,
and antechambers still remain; and even its painted
ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial
linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars, flowers,
clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache--as
would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less.
Here ... lives Mr. Tulkinghorn.... Like as he is to look at,
so is his apartment in the dusk of the afternoon. Rusty, out
of date, withdrawing from attention, able to afford it."
The house thus described by Dickens was that of his friend Forster,
and, no doubt, he knew it well. Very few private houses exist, I
imagine, in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields to-day: and poor "Allegory" is now
there for ever at a discount. The fine mansions, with their paved
forecourts and massive gate-posts, have had their day, and have now
ceased (for the larger world, that is) to be. Yet it is an imposing
square still, and, seen in the sunshine of a May morning, is
distinctly attractive.
Very attractive, too, is Staple Inn, so well known to Londoners by its
old gabled Holborn front. This, in some ways the most charming of all
the Inns, is kindly preserved to us by the altruism of the Prudential
Assurance Company, whose property it is, and who at considerable
expense have repaired and saved from destruction this historical "bit"
of Old London. The picturesque gables of Staple Inn, its well-known
lath-and-plaster front, would, indeed, be sadly missed if they
disappeared from the line of Holborn. Nothing so well gives the idea
of the London of the Tudors, of the early Stuarts, as this
time-honoured edifice. Staple Inn, though generally supposed to be
earlier, is really of the time of James I: and its crumbling and
insecure walls, during the recent (and still continuing) building
operations near it, have required much "underpinning."
Entering under the archway of Staple Inn, we find ourselves suddenly
in a quiet old court set about with plane trees, and in the middle a
rustic seat placed, in countrified fashion, round a tree trunk; the
old Hall of the Inn forming the background. It is a charming spot
enough, with a most collegiate and secluded air; an air so strange,
indeed, in this neighbourhood as to have struck many writers, among
others Nathaniel Hawthorne:
"I went astray" (he says) "in Holborn, through an arched
entrance, over which was 'Staple Inn' ... but in a court
opening inwards from this was a surrounding seclusion of
quiet dwelling houses, with beautiful green shrubbery and
grass-plots in the court, and a great many sunflowers in
full bloom.... There was ... not a quieter spot in England
than this. In all the hundreds of years since London was
built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over
that little island of quiet."
And Dickens thus writes of it:
"Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, where certain
gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking out
on the public way ... is a little nook composed of two
irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those
nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street
imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having
put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots. It is
one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in
smoky trees, as though they called to one another, 'Let us
play at country.'"
Dickens made this the abode of his kindly lawyer of _Edwin Drood_ (Mr.
Grewgious). The chambers where that gentleman is supposed to have
dwelt are marked on a stone above the doorway, with initials, and a
date--1747.
Beyond the first square, through another archway, a garden-plot is
reached, the garden of the Hall. Very picturesque is this old Hall,
long and low, with gabled lanthorns,--one large, one small,--and high
timber roofs. The garden plot is bright even in winter, with
variegated laurels and a privet hedge; these, with the darkened
red-brick of the old Hall, make a charming picture. Opposite the
garden-court extends the new and very attractive modern building of
1843, on a raised terrace: designed in early Jacobean style, and of a
simple dignity that does not quarrel with its surroundings. This line
of buildings is continued towards Chancery Lane by the new "Government
Patent Office," an admirable structure as yet untouched by the
mellowing London smoke. The buildings of the "Birkbeck Bank" opposite,
which, in their turn, tower over the little Staple Inn Hall and
garden, show,--in painful contrast both to their unobjectionable
Holborn front, and to the fine simplicity of the Patent Office,--a
very ornate medley of terra-cotta and Doulton-ware; a chaos of
bluish-green pillars and aggressive plaques and tiles, for which,
indeed, some covering of London soot is greatly to be wished. One
might almost think that one had got into Messrs. Spiers and Pond's
refreshment-rooms or a "Central-Railway-station" by mistake.
Disillusions, however, are frequent in this semi-chaotic region of new
and old buildings, and it must be confessed that the back of the
Patent Office (in "Quality Court") is somewhat disappointing after its
front view; it resembles, with its old, blackened pillars, a disused
dissenting chapel; and Quality Court itself seems, like so many of the
purlieus of the smaller Inns, mainly redolent of charwomen, cats, and
orange-peel. Nevertheless, even in dingy "Quality Court" there are
some respectable houses with quaint old doorways, as well as some good
iron-work in the upper balconies.
[Illustration: _Fetter Lane._]
Some of the neighbouring courts are, however, far more unsavoury. See,
for instance, "Fleur-de-Lis" Court, off Fetter Lane, a miserable,
dilapidated flagged alley. The last time I visited this place, I
found a few dirty children dancing to a poor cripple's playing of a
kind of spinet or portable piano (some of the "music" of these
peripatetic street-players is of a weird kind). Fleur-de-Lis
Court!--charmingly named, but, like all courts with such romantic
appellations, particularly grimy and squalid. Further up, away from
Fetter Lane, where the "court" or narrow alley becomes even more
wretchedly ruinous, is a barn-like place labelled "Newton Hall." It
seems at a first glance to be the very abomination of desolation; its
rusty door padlocked, with an air, too, of never-being-opened. Is
there anything, I wondered at a first glance, more dismal in all
London? Yet, on looking nearer, I seemed to see something
comparatively clean shining on the wall of "Newton Hall," amid the
surrounding grime. Can it be,--yes, it is,--a label,--and apparently
affixed there within the memory of man: "Positivist Society." Surely,
I reflected, the Positivist Cause must be in a bad way, if the
dilapidation of the buildings be any guide to the state of the
persuasion itself! It is, however, unfair to judge the state of
Positivism from Fleur-de-Lis Court, for the whole neighbourhood has,
evidently, but a short span of life remaining, and the court and its
purlieus will soon be things of the past. Positivism is already
removing or removed; and Newton Hall, till Fleur-de-Lis Court is
transmogrified in the march of progress into offices or
model-dwellings, will rust for some few years in peace.
The neighbourhood in which the old Hall stands is full of historic
memories. As is ever the case in crowded Central London, the past, the
many pasts, are strangely involved and blended, buried one beneath the
other. Dryden and Otway are said to have once lived--and
quarrelled--on and near this site. Then, in 1710, Sir Isaac Newton,
the then President of the Royal Society, induced that body to buy a
house and garden here from Dr. Barebones, a descendant of the
"Praise-God-Barebones" of Puritan times. Sir Christopher Wren
concurred in the purchase, and L1,450 was paid for the freehold. In
this house the Royal Society held their meetings till they removed to
Somerset House in 1782; and they built on its garden the present
"Newton Hall,"--which hall, some say, is really from the designs of
Wren. In 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, unhappy son of genius, gave
his last public lectures here; later, it was used as a chapel, and
then the Positivist Society made it their home. It is strange to
reflect that the chief reason advanced by Sir Isaac Newton to the
Royal Society for the purchase of this site, was that it was "in the
middle of the town and out of noise."
At the Holborn end of Fetter Lane there are still some fine old gabled
houses, which must soon vanish; several little Inns of Chancery,
byways out of Holborn and the Strand, have already been swept away:
Thavies' Inn for instance, where Dickens, surely by an intentional
anachronism, places Mrs. Jellyby's untidy home; Lyon's Inn, near Wych
Street, destroyed in 1863; Old Furnival's Inn, on the opposite side of
Holborn, where Dickens lived when he was first married, has been
replaced by the offices of the Prudential Assurance Company, the
saviours of Staple Inn, in intense red-brick. Lastly, Barnard's Inn
(originally Mackworth's Inn), a charming little Holborn Inn on a tiny
scale, with small courts, trees, a miniature hall and lanthorn, has
been bought up by the Mercers' Company and is used by them as a
school. This Inn is therefore not now accessible to the casual
visitor; its Holborn entrance may, indeed, easily be missed; "Mercers'
School," in big gilt letters, adorns its narrow doorway. What a
delightful private residence, one thinks, for some rich man, would
such a little Inn as this have made! Strange that no rich man has ever
thought so! the rich, like sheep, flock ever towards the less
interesting West End. Dickens, as I have suggested, had little eye for
the purely picturesque; and of this little Inn, compared by Loftie to
one of De Hooghe's pictures, he merely says (in _Great Expectations_,)
that it is "the dirtiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed
together in a rank corner as a club for tom-cats!" So much, indeed, is
Beauty in the eye of the seer! Barnard's Inn is also remarkable for
having been, in the last century, the abode of the last of the
alchemists.
A gateway on the north side of Holborn leads to Gray's Inn, the most
northerly of the four big Inns of Court. The gardens of Gray's Inn
are green and spacious, and its courts and quadrangles have a sober
solidity that is very attractive. This Inn affords a welcome retreat
from two of the noisiest and most unpoetic thoroughfares in
London,--Gray's Inn Road and Theobald's Road.
Here is Hawthorne's description of Gray's Inn Gardens:
"Gray's Inn is a great quiet domain, quadrangle beyond
quadrangle close beside Holborn, and a large space of
greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so
much of ancient quietude right in the monster City's very
jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up--right in its
very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall
not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest
of its bustling streets. Nothing else in London is so like
the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these
archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble,
rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed
into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath."
And Charles Lamb also said of them:
"These are the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court--my
beloved Temple not forgotten--have the gravest character,
their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing.
Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel
walks."
Bacon (Lord Verulam) planted here not only the spreading elm-trees,
but also a catalpa in the garden's north-east corner. In Gray's Inn is
also "Bacon's Mount," which answers to the recommendation in the
"Essay on Gardens"; "A mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall
of the enclosure breast high, to look abroad into the fields." Gray's
Inn Walks were, in Stuart times, very rural as well as very
fashionable; in 1621 we find them mentioned by Howell as "the
pleasantest place about London, with the choicest society"; and the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_ alike confirm this statement.
But, alas! Gray's Inn Walks are curtailed, and its gardens deserted
enough, at the present day! No more does Fashion walk there, unless it
be the "fashion" of the Gray's Inn Road. Many of the solid brick
squares are fallen, like Mr. Tulkinghorn's haunt of "Allegory," into
comparative decay; others, perhaps, are still more or less
substantial; but the grime of many unpainted years of occupation must,
one thinks, be more or less conducive to midnight gloom, or even to
the before-mentioned complaint of "the 'orrors!" And yet, with all
these drawbacks, do not the suites of rooms in the Inn emanate a
semi-historic charm, a charm that the newer "flats" can never, never
possess? Even apart from mere history, places where people have lived
and experienced and suffered, always, I think, breathe a certain
humanity.... And I would rather, for my part, have a dinner of herbs
in Gray's Inn, in a low-roofed panelled parlour, with windows open on
to the green enclosure below, than enjoy all the dainties of the clubs
in a "Palace Mansions," with all the newest electric appliances.... I
would rather hear the dim echoes of the past in the rustle of the
Gray's Inn elm-trees, or the plash of the Temple Fountain, than boast
of a theatre agency next door, or live in a West End street of ever so
desirable people.... I would rather breathe the sweet and solitary
content of a City quadrangle, than the fevered and stormy dissipation
of Mayfair ... I would rather....
But the day darkens, and reminds me that I have wandered long enough
in these City closes. Farewell, old Inns! haunts of ancient peace,
goodnight! You will, surely, not always remain as you have been in the
past. For some of you, that all-invading iconoclast, the builder, will
alter and destroy old landmarks; for others, but few springs, maybe,
will return to awake and gladden you into green beauty of plane and
elm. Yet, even then, the memories of past glories will haunt the
sacred place, and fill it with "a diviner air"; even then, will surely
never wholly be abolished or destroyed those traditions of former
greatness that
"--like the actions of the just,
Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust."