Lull'd by the lapse of gliding floods, Cheer'd by the warbling of the woods, How blest my days, my thoughts how free, In sweet society with thee! Then all was joyous, all was young, And years, unheeded, roll'd along; But now the pleasing dream is o'er,-- These scenes must charm me now no more. Lost to the field and torn from you, Farewell! a long, a last adieu. Edmund Burke was entered at the Middle Temple in 1747, and kept his terms in 1750. But the great tribune was never called to the bar. Had he been, what a powerful advocate, what a pitiless adversary, he would have made! Porson, the brilliant but bibulous classicist, has left behind him many sad stories of his pranks during his residence in Essex Court, where he had chambers immediately above those occupied by the future Baron Gurney, whom, in one of his debauches, he came near burning in his bed. Chaucer is believed to have entered as a student of the Middle Temple, where he is supposed to have formed a friendship with the "moral Gower." Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Edward Bramston, Lord-Keeper Guildford, Edmund Plowden,--perhaps the greatest lawyer of the Elizabethan epoch, --"Ugly" Dunning, who afterward became Lord Ashburton, and Lord Eldon, are among the ornaments of the British bench and bar who sprung from the Middle Temple. Now, however, the glories of the Middle Temple rest chiefly in the past. It has decreased in wealth and in numbers. There is an old proverb which says, "The Inner Temple for the rich, the Middle Temple for the poor;" and a famous wit emphasized this saying by a happy _mot_. After one of its far from _recherché_ dinners, he compared a gritty salad, of which he had been unlucky enough to partake, to "eating a gravel walk and meeting an occasional weed." The hall of the Inner Temple is a modern building, and was opened by the Princess Louise on May 4, 1870. More spacious than the one it replaced, it contains a number of cosy offices and ante-rooms. There is also attached a lunch-room for the use of members, much frequented in term-time, when at the mid-day hour one may meet many of the great practitioners at the English bar. Passable portraits of William and Mary, Queen Anne, Lord Chief-Justice Coke, and Sir Thomas Littleton look upon the visitor, and the arms of the successive treasurers of the Inn are blazoned on the walls.