_: "Temple Bar has always seemed
to me a weak point in the fortifications of London. Bless you, the
besieging army would never stay to bombard it--they would dash through
the barber's."

The Great Fire never reached nearer Temple Bar than the Inner Temple, on
the south side of Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan's Church, on the north.

The Bar is of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackens
and calcines; and each facade has four Corinthian pilasters, an
entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two
niches, stand, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman
costume. Charles I. has long ago lost his baton, as he once deliberately
lost his head. Over the keystone of the central arch there used to be
the royal arms. On the east side are James I. and Elizabeth (by many
able writers supposed to be Anne of Denmark, James I.'s queen). She is
pointing her white finger at Child's; while he, looking down on the
passing cabs, seems to say, "I am nearly tired of standing; suppose we
go to Whitehall, and sit down a bit?"

The slab over the eastern side of the arch bears the following
inscription, now all but smoothed down by time:--

"Erected in the year 1670, Sir Samuel Starling, Mayor; continued in
the year 1671, Sir Richard Ford, Lord Mayor; and finished in the
year, 1672, Sir George Waterman, Lord Mayor."

All these persons were friends of Pepys.

The upper part of the Bar is flanked by scrolls, but the fruit and
flowers once sculptured on the pediment, and the supporters of the royal
arms over the posterns, have crumbled away. In the centre of each facade
is a semicircular-headed, ecclesiastical-looking window, that casts a
dim horny light into a room above the gate, held of the City, at an
annual rent of some L50, by Messrs. Childs, the bankers, as a sort of
muniment-room for their old account-books. There is here preserved,
among other costlier treasures of Mammon, the private account-book of
Charles II. The original Child was a friend of Pepys, and is mentioned
by him as quarrelling with the Duke of York on Admiralty matters. The
Child who succeeded him was a friend of Pope, and all but led him into
the South-Sea Bubble speculation.

Those affected, mean statues, with the crinkly drapery, were the work of
a vain, half-crazed sculptor named John Bushnell, who died mad in 1701.
Bushnell, who had visited Rome and Venice, executed Cowley's monument in
Westminster