The best-known, perhaps, of the gardens are those belonging to the Inner and Middle Temple, as their green lawns are visible from the Embankment. They add greatly to the charm of one of London’s most beautiful roadways, now, alas! desecrated by the rush of electric trams, and its fine young trees sacrificed to make yet more rapid the stream of beings hourly passing between South London and the City. The modern whirl of business life can leave nothing untouched in this age of bustle, money-making, ceaseless toil, and care. Even pleasures have to be provided by united effort, and partake of noise and hurry. Thought and contemplation are hardly counted among the pleasures of life; yet to those who value them, even to look through the iron railings on the smooth turf brings a sense of relief. Even to those who scarcely seem to feel it, the very existence of these haunts of comparative peace, which flash on their vision as they hurry by, leaves something, a subtle influence, a faint impression on the brain. It must make a difference to a child who knows nothing beyond the noisy streets and alleys in which its lot is cast, to hear the rooks caw and the birds sing in the quiet gardens of Gray’s Inn. It must come as a welcome relief, even though unperceived and unappreciated, from the din and clatter in which most of its days are passed. One cannot be too grateful that it has not been thought necessary to change and modernise “our English juridical university.” Although the four great Inns of Court are untouched, the lesser Inns have vanished or are vanishing. Clement’s Inn has gone. The garden there was small, but had a special feature of its own--a sun-dial upheld by the kneeling figure of a blackamoor. This is now preserved in the Temple Garden, where it appeared soon after Clement’s Inn was disestablished in 1884. Clement’s Inn, which appertained to the Inner Temple, was so named from the Church of St. Clement Danes and St. Clement’s Well, where “the City Youth on Festival Days used to entertain themselves with a variety of Diversions.” The sun-dial is said to have been presented to the Inn by a Holles, Lord Clare, and some writers state that it was brought from Italy. It was, however, more probably made in London by John Van Nost, a Dutch sculptor, who came to England in William III.’s time, and established himself in Piccadilly. When he died in 1711 the business was continued by John Cheere, brother of Sir Henry Cheere, who executed various monuments in Westminster Abbey. Similar work is known to have issued from this studio. At Clifford’s Inn, which was also attached to the Inner Temple, there is still a vestige of the garden, but it looks a miserable doomed wreck, a few black trees rising among heaps of earth and rubbish. It was described in 1756 as “an airy place, and neatly kept; the garden being inclosed with a pallisado Pale, and adorned with Rows of Lime trees, set round the gravel Plats and gravel walks.” Its present