barons of the exchequer, masters
of the rolls, treasurers, readers, prothonotaries, poets, and authors
jostle each other in dusty confusion. At the entrance, under a canopy,
is the recumbent figure of the great lawyer of Elizabeth's time, Edmund
Plowden. This grave and wise man, being a staunch Romanist, was slighted
by the Protestant Queen. It is said that he was so studious in his youth
that at one period he never went out of the Temple precincts for three
whole years. He was Treasurer of the Middle Temple the year the hall was
built.

Selden (that great writer on international law, whose "Mare clausum" was
a reply to the "Mare liberum" of Grotius) is buried to the left of the
altar, the spot being marked by a monument of white marble. "His grave,"
says Aubrey, "was about ten feet deepe or better, walled up a good way
with bricks, of which also the bottome was paved, but the sides at the
bottome for about two foot high were of black polished marble, wherein
his coffin (covered with black bayes) lyeth, and upon that wall of
marble was presently lett downe a huge black marble stone of great
thicknesse, with this inscription--'Hic jacet corpus Johannis Seldeni,
qui obijt 30 die Novembris, 1654.' Over this was turned an arch of brick
(for the house would not lose their ground), and upon that was throwne
the earth," &c.

There is a monument in the triforium to Edmund Gibbon, a herald and an
ancestor of the historian. The great writer alluding to this monument
says--"My family arms are the same which were borne by the Gibbons of
Kent, in an age when the College of Heralds religiously guarded the
distinctions of blood and name--a lion rampant gardant between three
schollop shells argent, on a field azure. I should not, however, have
been tempted to blazon my coat of arms were it not connected with a
whimsical anecdote. About the reign of James I., the three harmless
schollop shells were changed by Edmund Gibbon, Esq., into three
ogresses, or female cannibals, with a design of stigmatising three
ladies, his kinswomen, who had provoked him by an unjust lawsuit. But
this singular mode of revenge, for which he obtained the sanction of Sir
William Seager, King-at-Arms, soon expired with its author; and on his
own monument in the Temple Church the monsters vanish, and the three
schollop shells resume their proper and hereditary place."

At the latter end of Charles II.'s reign the organ in the Temple Church
became the subject o