accurate copy of an older one. It also proclaimed an Indulgence of sixty days to annual visitors, the earliest known example, I believe, of this particular form of taxation. The Church was again dedicated in 1240. The rectangular portion of the Church, the Eastern portion added to the Western Round, was now probably reconstructed, supplanting a former chancel or choir, just at the period when the new Pointed style had ousted the round Norman. The circular type of church is not peculiar to the Order of Templars, as we have seen, or even to the Christians, but the choice of it was due in this case to the practice of imitating the architecture, as the topography, of the Holy Places at Jerusalem. In England, Round Churches occur at Ludlow and Cambridge (1101), built before the Knights of the Temple were established. St. Sepulchre at Northampton is possibly a Templar Church, but the Round Church at Little Maplestead in Essex belongs to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was built by the Knights Hospitallers. The Temple Church escaped the Fire of London as by a miracle, for the flames came as near as the Master’s House at the East End. It escaped the fire of 1678, when the old Chapel[18] of St. Anne, once perhaps the scene of the initiation of the Knights Templars, lying at the junction of Round and Rectangle, was destroyed by gunpowder to save the church. But it could not escape the destroying hands of the nineteenth-century Goths. For here, between 1824 and 1840, the great Gothic Revivalists indulged in one of their most ineffable and ineffaceable triumphs of intemperate enthusiasm. The Round part of the Church was almost rebuilt, and the old carvings were supplanted by inferior modern work. The conical roof was added; the horrid battlements banished. The old marble columns were removed and replaced by new ones, to obtain which the old Purbeck quarries were reopened. This marble takes an extraordinarily high polish, and presents a surface so clean and lustrous as to be almost shocking in its contrast to our dingy London atmosphere, and buildings begrimed with dirt and soot. The many brasses, which Camden praised, have disappeared; the rich collection of tablets and monuments and inscribed gravestones that once pleased the eye of Pepys, and formed a feast of heraldic ornament, has been dispersed, and found sanctuary in the tiny Churchyard without, on the north side of the Church, or in the Triforium. The floor of the Church was, at the same time, wisely lowered to its original level, and covered with a pavement of tiles designed after the pattern of the remains of old ones found there, or in the Chapter House of Westminster.