FLEET STREET AND THE LAW

Temple Bar Charles Lamb The Retired Cit The Griffin Printer's Ink An All-night Walk in London The Temple Oliver Goldsmith Lamb Again Lincoln's Inn Ben Jonson The Record office Museum Historic Autographs Lincoln's Inn Fields Old Mansions Great First Nights The Soane Museum Dr. Johnson The Cheshire Cheese St. Dunstan's and St. Bride's.

WHEN I first knew London passing through it on the way to a northern terminus and thence to school Temple Bar was still standing. But in 1878 it was pulled down, and with its disappearance old London's doom may be said to have sounded. Since that day the demolishers have taken so much courage into their hands that now what is old has to be sought out: whereas Temple Bar thrust antiquity and all that was leisurely and obsolete right into one's notice with unavoidable emphasis. The day on which it was decreed that Fleet Street's traffic must be no longer embarrassed by that beautiful sombre gateway, on that day Dr. Johnson's London gave up the ghost and a new utilitarian London came into being.

ST. MARY'S LE STRAND

By the way, it is worth while to give an afternoon to a walk from Enfield to Watham. Cross, through Theobald's Park, in order to stand before Temple Bar in its new setting. Enfield is in itself interesting enough, if only for its associations with one who loved London with a love that was almost a passion, and who never tired of running over her charms and looking with wistful eyes from his rural exile across the fields towards the veil of smoke beneath which she spread her allurements: I mean, of course, Charles Lamb. It was an odd chance, which no one could have foreseen, least of all perhaps himself, to whom it must have stood for all that was most solid and permanent and essentially urban, that carried Temple Bar (beneath whose shadow he was born) to this new home among green fields, very near his own.

The Bar stands now as one of the gateways to Theobaldi's Park. It was bought prior to demolition by Sir Henry Meux, and every brick and stone was numbered, so that the work of setting it up again in 1888 exactly as of old was quite simple. I know of no act of civic piety prettier than this. And there Temple Bar stands, and will stand, beneath great trees, a type of the prosperous cit who after a life of hard work amid the hum of the streets retires to a little place not too far from town and spends the balance of his days in Diocletian repose. What sights and pageants Temple Bar must recall and ruminate upon in its green solitude! The transplantation of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon to the British :Museum from dominating the Acropolis and Athens to serving as a source of perplexity to British sightseers in an overheated gallery of Bloomsbury is hardly more violent than the transplantation of Temple Bar from Fleet Street and the city's feet to Hertfordshire and solitude.

A concrete example of English taste in the eighteen-seventies is offered by the study of the statuary and ornamentation of the Griffin the memorial which was selected to mark the site of Wren's gateway. It is curious to remember that the heads of traitors were displayed publicly on the spikes of Temple Bar as recently as 1772. Barbarism is always surprising us by its proximity.

Even less than the Strand's pavements are those of Fleet Street fitted for loiterers. In fact we are now in the City, and urgent baste has begun; not quite as in Cheapside and Broad Street, for no one here goes without a hat, but bustle is now in the air, and with every step eastward we shall be more in the fray. From Fleet Street, however, though it may in itself seethe with activity, the escape is easy into quietude more perfect than any that the Strand has offered; for here is the Temple on the south, and on the north Lincoln's Inn with its gardens ; here also are Clifford's Inn and Serjeants' Inn; and here, are the oddest alleys, not narrower than those between the Strand and Maiden Lane, but more tortuous and surprising, the air of all of them (if you can call it air) heavy with the thick oiliness of printer's ink.

Printer's ink is indeed the life blood of Fleet Street and its environs. The chief newspaper offices of London are all around us. "The Times," it is true, is fixed a little to the south-east, on the other side of Ludgate Hill station; but in Fleet Street, and between it and Holborn on the north and the river on the south, are nearly all the others.

On an all-night walk in London, which is an enterprise quite worth adventuring upon, it is well to be in Fleet Street between three and five, when it springs into intense activity as the carts are being loaded with the papers for the early morning trains. From here one would go to Covent Garden and smell the flowers the best antidote to printer's ink that has been discovered.

The Temple, which spreads her cool courts and gardens all unsuspected within a few yards of Fleet Street, is best gained by the gateway opposite Chancery Lane, by the old house with a ceiling of Tudor roses which is now a County Council preserve. Almost immediately we come to the Temple church, the most beautiful small church in London and one of the most beautiful in the world so grave in character and austere and decisive in all its lines; and yet so human too and interesting, with its marble Templars lying there on their circular pavement in a repose that has already endured for five centuries and should last for centuries more. Many of Lamb's old Benchers are buried beneath this church; and here also lie the learned John Selden, and James Howell who wrote the " Epistol ."

To the north of the church is a plain slab recording that Oliver Goldsmith, that eminent Londoner and child of genius, lies beneath it. He died at No. 2 Brick Court, up two pairs of stairs, in a "closet without any light in it," as Thackeray, who later had rooms below, described the poet's bedroom. That was on April 4, 1774, and the next morning, when the news went out, it was to this door that there came all kinds of unfortunate creatures to whom he had been kind weeping and friendless now.

To name all the illustrious men who have had chambers in the Temple would not only be an undertaking of great magnitude but would smell overmuch of the Law. Rather would I lay stress on the more human names, such as poor Goldsmith's and Charles Lamb's. It was a little less than a year after Goldsmith had died at 2 Brick Court that at the same number in Crown Office Row Charles Lamb was born on February 10, 1775. The Row is still there, but it has been rebuilt since Lamb's day, or perhaps only refaced. The gateway opposite leading into the garden is the same, as its date testifies. Lamb claimed to be a Londoner of the Londoners ; but few Londoners have the opportunity of spending their childhood amid so much air and within sight of so much greenery as he. Perhaps to these early associations we may attribute some of the joy with which in after life, Londoner as he was (having lent his heart in usury to the City's stones and scenes), he would set out on an expedition among green fields. The building near the church called Lamb House has nothing to do with the essayist.

I ventured just now to mock a little at the Law; and yet it is not fair to do so, for it is the Law that has preserved for London this beautiful Temple where all is peace and eighteenth-century gravity. Yet not everything has it retained, since no longer are the Inns of Court revels held here. It was in the Middle Temple Hall, which is a perfect example of Elizabethan architecture, that "Twelfth Night" was first played.

Lincoln's Inn, the Law's domain on the other side of Fleet Street, has its lawns and seclusion and old world quiet too ; but it does not compare with the Temple. The Temple's little enclosed courts, with plane trees in their midst, of the tenderest green imaginable in early spring; her sun-dials and her emblems ; her large green spaces sloping to the river; her church and her Master's house ; her gateways and alleys and the long serene line of King's Bench Walk these are possessions which Lincoln's Inn can but envy. And yet New Square is one of the most satisfying of London's many grave parallelograms ; and the chapel which Inigo Jones built rises nobly from the ground; and the old gateway in Chancery Lane does something to compensate for the loss of Temple Bar. Its date, 1518, disposes of the story that Ben Jonson helped to build it, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, but I like to believe that he did a little desultory bricklaying in this way on some extension to it.

Before going through this comely and venerable gateway there is a very attractive little museum to be visited on the opposite side of the road. For the great white building here is the Record Office, where the State papers are kept and where any student of antiquity may read them, in the little circular room for that purpose, so like one of the tiny offspring of the Reading Room of the British Museum. During the war the documents were housed for safety in Bodmin gaol. As it happened no bomb fell on the Record Office but the chapel of Lincoln's Inn, only a few yards distant, was badly damaged.