ive or six, 'like old soldiers in a
garrison') resume its activity and bustle in the spring; and he
moralised, like a great reformer, on the legal constitution established,
the social laws enforced, and the particular castigations endured for
the good of the community, by those black-dressed and black-eyed
chatterers. 'I have often amused myself,' Goldsmith remarks, 'with
observing their plans of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks
upon a grove where they have made a colony, in the midst of the city.'"

CHAPTER XVI.

THE TEMPLE (_continued_).

Fountain Court and the Temple Fountain--Ruth Pinch--L.E.L.'s
Poem--Fig-tree Court--The Inner Temple Library--Paper Buildings--The
Temple Gate--Guildford North and Jeffreys--Cowper, the Poet: his
Melancholy and Attempted Suicide--A Tragedy in Tanfield Court--Lord
Mansfield--"Mr. Murray" and his Client--Lamb's Pictures of the
Temple--The Sun-dials--Porson and his Eccentricities--Rules of the
Temple--Coke and his Labours--Temple Riots--Scuffles with the
Alsatians--Temple Dinners--"Calling" to the Bar--The Temple
Gardens--The Chrysanthemums--Sir Matthew Hale's Tree--Revenues of
the Temple--Temple Celebrities.

Lives there a man with soul so dead as to write about the Temple without
mentioning the little fountain in Fountain Court?--that pet and
plaything of the Temple, that, like a little fairy, sings to beguile the
cares of men oppressed with legal duties. It used to look like a
wagoner's silver whip--now a modern writer cruelly calls it "a pert
squirt." In Queen Anne's time Hatton describes it as forcing its stream
"to a vast and almost incredible altitude"--it is now only ten feet
high, no higher than a giant lord chancellor. Then it was fenced with
palisades--now it is caged in iron; then it stood in a square--now it is
in a round. But it still sparkles and glitters, and sprinkles and
playfully splashes the jaunty sparrows that come to wash off the London
dust in its variegated spray. It is quite careless now, however, of
notice, for has it not been immortalised by the pen of Dickens, who has
made it the centre of one of his most charming love scenes? It was in
Fountain Court, our readers will like to remember, that Ruth
Pinch--gentle, loving Ruth--met her lover, by the merest accident of
course.

"There was," says Mr. Dickens, "a little plot between them that Tom
should always come out of the Temple by one way, and