vice, luxury, and extravagance, the
banquet lasted from the 4th to the 17th of August. It was, in fact, open
house to all London. The first day came the nobles and privy
councillors; the second, the Lord Mayor and aldermen; the third, the
whole College of Physicians in their mortuary caps and gowns; the
fourth, the doctors and advocates of civil law; on the fifth day, the
archbishops, bishops, and obsequious clergy; and on the fifteenth, as a
last grand explosion, the King, the Duke of York, the Duke of
Buckingham, and half the peers. An entrance was made from the river
through the wall of the Temple Garden, the King being received on
landing by the Reader and the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas;
the path from the garden to the wall was lined with the Reader's
servants, clad in scarlet cloaks and white doublets; while above them
stood the benchers, barristers, and students, music playing all the
while, and twenty violins welcoming Charles into the hall with unanimous
scrape and quaver. Dinner was served by fifty young students in their
gowns, no meaner servants appearing. In the November following the Duke
of York, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Dorset were admitted
members of the Society of the Inner Temple. Six years after, Prince
Rupert, then a grizzly old cavalry soldier, and addicted to experiments
in chemistry and engraving in his house in the Barbican, received the
same honour.

The great fire of 1666, says Mr. Jeaffreson, in his "Law and Lawyers,"
was stayed in its westward course at the Temple; but it was not
suppressed until the flames had consumed many sets of chambers, had
devoured the title-deeds of a vast number of valuable estates, and had
almost licked the windows of the Temple Church. Clarendon has recorded
that on the occasion of this stupendous calamity, which occurred when a
large proportion of the Templars were out of town, the lawyers in
residence declined to break open the chambers and rescue the property of
absent members of their society, through fear of prosecution for
burglary. Another great fire, some years later (January, 1678-79),
destroyed the old cloisters and part of the old hall of the Inner
Temple, and the greater part of the residential buildings of the "Old
Temple." Breaking out at midnight, and lasting till noon of next day, it
devoured, in the Middle Temple, the whole of Pump Court (in which
locality it originated), Elm-tree Court, Vine Court, and part of Brick
Cou