The old black gateway, once the dreaded Golgotha of English traitors, separates, it should be remembered, the Strand from Fleet Street, the city from the shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the Liberty of the City of Westminster. As Hatton (1708--Queen Anne) says,--"This gate opens not immediately into the City itself, but into the Liberty or Freedom thereof." We need hardly say that nothing can be more erroneous than the ordinary London supposition that Temple Bar ever formed part of the City fortifications. Mr. Gilbert a Beckett, laughing at this tradition, once said in _Punch_: "Temple Bar has always seemed to me a weak point in the fortifications of London. Bless you, the besieging army would never stay to bombard it--they would dash through the barber's." The Great Fire never reached nearer Temple Bar than the Inner Temple, on the south side of Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan's Church, on the north. The Bar is of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackens and calcines; and each facade has four Corinthian pilasters, an entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two niches, stand, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman costume. Charles I. has long ago lost his baton, as he once deliberately lost his head. Over the keystone of the central arch there used to be the royal arms. On the east side are James I. and Elizabeth (by many able writers supposed to be Anne of Denmark, James I.'s queen). She is pointing her white finger at Child's; while he, looking down on the passing cabs, seems to say, "I am nearly tired of standing; suppose we go to Whitehall, and sit down a bit?" The slab over the eastern side of the arch bears the following inscription, now all but smoothed down by time:-- "Erected in the year 1670, Sir Samuel Starling, Mayor; continued in the year 1671, Sir Richard Ford, Lord Mayor; and finished in the year, 1672, Sir George Waterman, Lord Mayor." All these persons were friends of Pepys. The upper part of the Bar is flanked by scrolls, but the fruit and flowers once sculptured on the pediment, and the supporters of the royal arms over the posterns, have crumbled away. In the centre of each facade is a semicircular-headed, ecclesiastical-looking window, that casts a dim horny light into a room above the gate, held of the City, at an annual rent of some L50, by Messrs. Childs, the bankers, as a sort of muniment-room for their old account-books. There is here preserved, among other costlier treasures of Mammon, the private account-book of Charles II. The original Child was a friend of Pepys, and is mentioned by him as quarrelling with the Duke of York on Admiralty matters. The Child who succeeded him was a friend of Pope, and all but led him into the South-Sea Bubble speculation.