the coming of William III., when Protestant ardour was transferred to Guy Fawkes' day. Roger North, in his “Examen," describes how the statue was provided every 17th of November with a wreath of gilded laurel and a golden shield with the motto "The Protestant Religion and Magna Charta," and how, while the figure of the Pope was burnt beneath it, the people shouted and sang

"Your popish plot and Smithfield threat

We do not fear at all,

For lo! beneath Queen Bess's feet,

You fall! You fall! You fall!

O Queen Bess! Queen Bess! Queen Bess!"

It was on the occasion of a tumult which arose at one of these anti-papal demonstrations (1680) that the Archbishop of York going to Lord Chief Justice North, and asking what was to be done, received the answer-" My Lord, fear God, and don't fear the people."

Within the arch hung the heavy oaken panelled gates, festooned with fruits and flowers, which opened to receive Charles II., James II., and every succeeding sovereign. In 1769 these gates were forcibly closed in "the Battle of Temple Bar," by the partisans of "Wilkes and Liberty," against the civic procession which was on its way to George III. The whole of the gateway was hung with black for the funeral of the Duke of Wellington.

No one sees Temple Bar without connecting it with the human remains-dried by summer heats, and beaten and occasionally hurled to the ground by winter storms -by which it was so long surmounted. The first ghastly ornament of the Bar was one of the quarters of Sir William Armstrong, Master of the Horse to Charles II., who

was concerned in the Rye House Plot, and who, after his execution (1684), was boiled in pitch and divided into four parts. The head and quarters of Sir William Perkins and the quarters of Sir John Friend, who had conspired to assassinate William III., " from love to

King James and the Prince of Wales," were next exhibited, "a dismal sight," says Evelyn, "which many pitied." The next head raised here was that of Joseph Sullivan, executed for high treason in 1715. Henry Osprey followed, who died for love of Prince Charlie in 1716; and Christopher Layer, executed for a plot to seize the king's person in

1723. The last heads which were exposed on the Bar were those which were concerned in the "rebellion of '45." It is difficult to believe that it is scarcely more than a hundred and twenty years since Colonel Francis Townley, George Fletcher, and seven other Jacobites were so barbarously dealt with-hanged on Kennington Common, cut down, disembowelled, beheaded, quartered, their hearts tossed into a fire, from which one of them was snatched by a bystander, who devoured it to show his loyalty. Walpole afterwards saw their heads on Temple Bar, and says that people used to make a trade of letting out spy-glasses to look at them at a halfpenny a look. The spikes which supported the heads were only removed in the present century. It was in front of the Bar that the miserable Titus Oates stood in the pillory, pelted with dead cats and rotten eggs, and that De Foe, placed in the pillory for a libel on the Government, stood there enjoying a perfect ovation from the people, who drank his health as they hung the pillory with flowers.

"I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. While we surveyed the Poets' Corner, I said to him, 'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.' When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, pointed to the heads upon it, and slyly whispered, 'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."-Dr. Johnson.

With the removal of Temple Bar an immensity of the associations of the past will be swept away. Almost all the well-known authors of the last two centuries have somehow had occasion to mention it. Fleet Street, just within its bounds, is still the centre for the offices of nearly all the leading newspapers and magazines, and those who stood beneath the soot-begrimed arches had to the last somewhat

of the experience which Dr. Johnson describes in his "Project for the Employment of Authors" (1756).

"It is my practice, when I am in want of amusement, to place myself for an hour at Temple Bar, and examine one by one the looks of the passengers; and I have commonly found that between the hours of eleven and four every sixth man is an author. They are seldom to be seen very early in the morning or late in the evening, but about dinnertime they are all in motion, and have one uniform eagerness in their faces, which gives little opportunity of discovering their hopes or fears, their pleasures or their pains. But in the afternoon, when they have all dined, or composed themselves to pass the day without a dinner, their passions have full play, and I can perceive one man wondering at the stupidity of the public, by which his new book has been totally neglected; another cursing the French, who fight away literary curiosity by their threat of an invasion; another swearing at his bookseller, who will advance no money without copy; another perusing as he walks his publisher's bill; another murmuring at an unanswerable criticism; another determining to write no more to a generation of barbarians; and another wishing to try once again whether he cannot awaken a drowsy world to a sense of his merit."

CHAPTER II.

THE INNS OF COURT.

UST within Temple Bar we may turn aside into the

J

repose of the first of the four Inns of Court (Middle Temple, Inner Temple, Lincoln's Inn, and Gray's Inn), which Ben Jonson calls "the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom." Here, beside the bustle of Fleet Street, yet utterly removed from it, are the groups of ancient buildings described by Spenser :

"-those bricky towers,

The which on Thames' broad aged back doe ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Temple knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride."

The earliest residence of the Knights Templar was in Holborn, but they removed hither in 1184. After their suppression in 1313 Edward I. gave the property to Aymer de Valence. At his death it passed into the hands of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, but was leased to the Inns of Court, so called because their inhabitants, who were students of the law, belonged to "the King's Court." It is interesting to notice how many of the peculiar terms used by the Templars seem to have descended with the