an old and very picturesque stationer’s shop, belonging to the firm of Abram and Sons, in whose family it has been since 1774. It is much more than a stationer’s shop, for Messrs. Abram have accumulated in the course of years a very valuable and interesting collection of old deeds and documents and prints. The overhanging stories of the house rest upon a row of slender iron pillars--pillars which Dr. Johnson used to touch with superstitious reverence each time he passed, in unconscious continuation of that ancient pillar-worship of which many traces linger, for those who have eyes to see, about the Temple and St. Paul’s. We are now in Middle Temple Lane, the narrow street down which the citizens of London were wont to hurry in order to take boat to Westminster from the Temple Stairs, in the days when the River was the highway between the City and the Court, between London and Westminster, the counting-houses of the merchants and the palace and abbey of the King. Of late years the introduction of tramways and of motor traffic on the Embankment has tended largely to revive the popularity of the old route, though not all the thousands of pounds squandered by the London County Council upon an ill-considered scheme of steamboats could induce the Londoner to adopt again the water-way, which the bend of the River and the tide must make slow. Next below us on the left is the group of chambers called Hare Court, a plain to ugly, red-brick to stock-brick barracks, through which one can reach the Temple Church. Beyond, on the right, we come to what remains of Brick Court. This is a most charming specimen of the Queen Anne style. An inscription over the doorway of No. 3, _Phœnicis instar revivisco_, informs us that it rose like the Phœnix from its ashes in 1704. But in this present year of Grace (1909), an old brick building has been removed, which fronted the Hall and the Lane, and which claimed to be the oldest building left in the Temple, the first constructed of brick, erected there in Elizabeth’s reign, and referred to by Spenser in the lines of his ‘Prothalamion’:-- ‘Those bricky towres, The which on Themmes brode aged backe doe ryde, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templar Knights to byde, Till they decayed thro’ pride.’ There is nothing, however, to prove that Spenser was referring to Brick Court. The ‘Prothalamion’ was published in 1596; and I would suggest that the phrase ‘bricky towres’ might apply most naturally to the Middle Temple Hall.