gowns, white jerkins, buskins, velvet shoes, double shirt-cuffs, or
feathers or ribbons in their caps. More over, no attorney was to be
admitted into either house. These monastic rules were intended to
preserve the gravity of the profession, and must have pleased the
Poloniuses and galled the Mercutios of those troublous days.

In Elizabeth's days Master Gerard Leigh, a pedantic scholar of the
College of Heralds, persuaded the misguided Inner Temple to abandon the
old Templar arms--a plain red cross on a shield argent, with a lamb
bearing the banner of the sinless profession, surmounted by a red cross.
The heraldic euphuist substituted for this a flying Pegasus striking out
the fountain of Hippocrene with its hoofs, with the appended motto of
"Volat ad astera virtus," a recondite allusion to men, like Chaucer and
Gower, who, it is said, had turned from lawyers to poets.

CHAPTER XV.

THE TEMPLE (_continued_).

The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits--Manningham's
Diary--Fox Hunts in Hall--The Grand Revels--Spenser--Sir J. Davis--A
Present to a King--Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple--Fires
in the Temple--The Last Great Revel in the Hall--Temple
Anecdotes--The Gordon Riots--John Scott and his Pretty Wife--Colman
"Keeping Terms"--Blackstone's "Farewell"--Burke--Sheridan--A Pair of
Epigrams--Hare Court--The Barber's Shop--Johnson and the Literary
Club--Charles Lamb--Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and
Extravagances--"Hack Work" for Booksellers--_The Deserted
Village_--_She Stoops to Conquer_--Goldsmith's Death and Burial.

In the glorious reign of Elizabeth the old Middle Temple Hall was
converted into chambers, and a new hall built. The present roof (says
Mr. Peter Cunningham) is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in
London. The screen, in the Renaissance style, was long supposed to be an
exact copy of the Strand front of Old Somerset House; but this is a
vulgar error; nor could it have been made of timber from the Spanish
Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before
the Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord Eldon and his
brother, Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty judge, are by Behnes. The
portraits are chiefly second-rate copies. The exterior was cased with
stone, in "wretched taste," in 1757. The diary of an Elizabethan
barrister, named Manningham, preserved in the Harleian Miscellanies, has
preserved