On the south side of Fleet Street, near to where it adjoins Temple Bar, lies the Inner Temple. It extends southward to the Thames, and contains long ranges of melancholy buildings, in which lawyers and their followers congregate. It is a district very memorable. About seven hundred years ago it was the abiding-place of the Knights Templars, who erected there a church, which still uplifts its round tower (its sole relic) for the wonder of modern times. Fifty years since, I remember, you entered the precinct through a lowering archway that opened into a gloomy passage--Inner Temple Lane. On the east side rose the church; and on the west was a dark line of chambers, since pulled down and rebuilt, and now called Johnson’s Buildings. At some distance westward was an open court, in which was a sun-dial, and, in the midst, a solitary fountain, that sent its silvery voice into the air above, the murmur of which, descending, seemed to render the place more lonely. Midway, between the Inner Temple Lane and the Thames, was a range of substantial chambers (overlooking the gardens and the busy river), called Crown Office Row. BRYAN W. PROCTER: ‘Charles Lamb, a Memoir.’ London: Edward Moxon & Co., 1866. * * * * * [Sidenote: Education.] Her education in youth was not much attended to; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading [the library of Mr. Salt, a barrister, to whom her father long acted as clerk] without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it, but I can answer for it, that it makes (if the worst comes to the worst) most incomparable old maids. CHARLES LAMB: _Mackery End, in Hertfordshire_, ‘Essays of Elia.’ (‘Works, with a Sketch of his Life,’ by Thomas Noon Talfourd. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838.) * * * * * [Sidenote: Effect of this reading.] A little selection would have made the pasturage all the wholesomer to a child of Mary’s sensitive, brooding nature; for the witch stories and the cruel tales of the sufferings of the martyrs on which she pored all alone, as her brother did after her, wrought upon her tender brain and lent their baleful aid to nourish those seeds of madness which she inherited. [Sidenote: Country pleasures.]