to Goldsmith, among others, to induce him to write in favour of the Administration. "I found him,' he said, “in a miserable set of chambers in the Temple. I told him my authority; I told him that I was empowered to pay most liberally for his exertions; and-would you believe it!-he was so absurd as to say, 'I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the assistance you offer is therefore unnecessary to me.' And so I left him," added the Rev. Dr. Scott, indignantly, "in his garret."

1

and half a pound of sugar as an acknowledgment. "1769. Goldsmith fell in love with Mary Horneck, known as the 'Jessamy Bride.' Unfortunately he obtained an advance of £500 for his 'Natural History,' and wholly expended it when only six chapters were written." In 1771 he published his "History of England." It was in this year that Reynolds, coming one day to Brick Court, perhaps about the portrait of Goldsmith he had painted the year before, found the mercurial poet kicking a bundle, which contained a masquerade dress, about the room, in disgust at his folly in wasting money in so foolish a way. In 1772, Mr. Forster mentions a very characteristic story of Goldsmith's warmth of heart. He one day found a poor Irish student (afterwards Dr. M'Veagh M'Donnell, a well-known physician) sitting and moping in despair on a bench in the Temple Gardens. Goldsmith soon talked and laughed him into hope and spirits, then taking him off to his chambers, employed him to translate some chapters of Buffon. In 1773 She Stoops to Conquer made a great hit; but Noll was still writing at hack-work, and was deeper in debt than ever. In 1774, when Goldsmith was still grinding on at his hopeless drudge-work, as far from the goal of fortune as ever, and even resolving to abandon London life, with all its temptations, Mr. Forster relates that Johnson, dining with the poet, Reynolds, and some one else, silently reproved the extravagance of so expensive a dinner by send

On the partial success of The Good-Natured Man (January, 1768), Goldsmith, having cleared £500, broke out like a successful gambler. He purchased a set of chambers (No. 2, up two pairs of stairs, in Brick Court) for £400, squandered the remaining 100, ran in debt to his tailor, and borrowed of Mr. Bolt, a man on the same floor. He purchased Wilton carpets, blue merino curtains, chimney-glasses, book-cases, and card-tables, and, by the aid of Filby, enrobed him in a suit of Tyrian bloom, satin grain, with darker blue silk breeches, price £8 2s. 7d., and he even ventured at a more costly suit, lined with silk and ornamented with gilt buttons. Below him lived that learned lawyer, Mr. Blackstone, then poring over the fourth volume of his precious "Commentaries," and the noise and dancing overhead nearly drove him mad, as it also did a Mr. Children, who succeeded him. The cause of these noises Mr. John Forster relates in his deligh fuling away the whole second course untouched. biography of the poet. An Irish merchant named Seguin "remembered dinners at which Johnson, Percy, Bickerstaff, Kelly, and a variety of authors of minor note,' were guests. They talked of supper-parties with younger people, as well in the London chambers as in suburban lodgings; preceded by blind-man's buff, forfeits, or games of cards; and where Goldsmith, festively entertaining them all, would make frugal supper for himself off boiled milk. They related how he would sing all kinds of Irish songs; with what special enjoyment he gave the Scotch ballad of 'Johnny Armstrong' (his old nurse's favourite); how cheerfully he would put the front of his wig behind, or contribute in any other way to the general amusement; and to what accompaniment of uncontrolled laughter he once danced a minuet with Mrs. Seguin.'"

In March, 1774, Goldsmith returned from Edg ware to his Temple chambers, which he was trying to sell, suffering from a low nervous fever, partly the result of vexation at his pecuniary embarrassments. Mr. Hawes, an apothecary in the Strand (and one of the first founders of the Humane Society), was called in; but Goldsmith insisted on taking James's fever-powders, a valuable medicine, but dangerous under the circumstances. This was on Friday, the 25th. He told the doctor then his mind was not at ease, and he died on Monday, April 4th, in his forty-fifth year. His debts amounted to over £2,000. "Was ever poet so trusted before?” writes Johnson to Boswell. The staircase of Brick Court was filled with poor outcasts, to whom Goldsmith had been kind and charitable. His coffin was opened by Miss Horneck, that a lock might be cut from his hair. Burke and Reynolds superintended the funeral, Reynolds' nephew, Palmer, afterwards Dean of Cashel, being chief mourner. Kelly, who had so often lampooned the poet, was present. At five o'clock on Saturday, the 9th of April, Goldsmith was buried in the Temple churchyard. In 1837. a slab of white marble, to the

Hugh

kindly poet's memory, was placed in the Temple Church, and afterwards transferred to a recess of the vestry chamber. Of the poet, Mr. Forster says, "no memorial indicates the grave to the pilgrim or the stranger, nor is it possible any longer to identify the spot which received all that was mortal of the delightful writer." The present site is entirely conjectural; but it appears from the following note, communicated to us by T. C. Noble, the well-known City antiquary, that the real site was remembered as late as 1830. Mr. Noble says:

"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

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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 CourtLord 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 charming love scenes? It was in Fountain Court, about the Temple without mentioning the little our readers will like to remember, that Ruth Pinch fountain in Fountain Court ?—that pet and play---gentle, loving Ruth-met her lover, by the merest thing of the Temple, that, like a little fairy, sings to accident of course. 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

"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 sources. Next to the plane, that has the strange his wondering observation. power of sloughing off its sooty bark, the fig seems the tree that best endures London's corrupted atmosphere. Thomas Fairchild, a Hoxton gardener, who wrote in 1722 (quoted by Mr. Peter Cunningham), alludes to figs ripening well in the Rolls Gardens, Chancery Lane, and to the tree thriving in close places about Bridewell. Who can say that some Templar pilgrim did not bring from the banks of " Abana or Pharpar, rivers of Damascus," the first leafy inhabitant of inky and dusty Figtree Court? Lord Thurlow was living here in 1758, the year he was called to the bar, and when, it was said, he had not money enough even to hire a horse to attend the circuit.

"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.

The Inner Temple Library stands on the terrace facing the river. The Parliament Chambers and Hall, in the Tudor style, were the work of Sidney Smirke, R.A., in 1835. The library, designed by Mr. Abrahams, is 96 feet long, 42 feet wide, and 63 feet high; it has a hammer-beam roof. One of the stained glass windows is blazoned with the arms of the Templars. Below the library are chambers. The cost of the whole was about £13,000. The north window is thought to too much resemble the great window at Westminster Hall.

Paper Buildings, a name more suitable for the offices of some City companies, were first built in the reign of James I., by a Mr. Edward Hayward and others; and the learned Dugdale describes them as eighty-eight feet long, twenty feet broad, and four storeys high. This Hayward was Selden's chamber-fellow, and to him Selden dedicated his "Titles of Honour." Selden, according to Aubrey, had chambers in these pleasant riverside buildings, looking towards the gardens, and in the uppermost storey he had a little gallery, to pace

"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. "Oh, foolish, panting, timid little heart! why did in and meditate. The Great Fire swept away

she feign to be unconscious of his coming?

"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 basin's rim and vanished."

"L. E. L." (Miss Landon) has left a graceful poem on this much-petted fountain, which begins,

"The fountain's low singing is heard on the wind,

Like a melody, bringing sweet fancies to mind-
Some to grieve, some to gladden; around them
they cast

The hopes of the morrow, the dreams of the past.
Away in the distance is heard the vast sound
From the streets of the city that compass it round,
Like the echo of fountains or ocean's deep call;
Yet that fountain's low singing is heard over all.'

Selden's chambers, and their successors were destroyed by the fire which broke out in Mr. Maule's chambers. Coming home at night from a dinnerparty, Maule, afterwards a judge, put a lighted candle under his bed by mistake. The stately new buildings were designed by Mr. Sidney Smirke, A.R.A., in 1848. The red brick and stone harmonise pleasantly. In 1878-9 Hare Court Buildings were extended towards the river, to answer to Paper Buildings.

The entrance to the Middle Temple from Fleet Street is a gatehouse of red brick pointed with stone, and is the work of Wren. It was erected in 1684, after the Great Fire, and is in the style of Inigo Jones-"not inelegant," says Ralph. It probably occupies the site of the gatehouse erected Fig-tree Court derived its name from obvious | by order of Wolsey, at the expense of his prisoner,