Goldsmith Buildings, that run parallel to the north side of the Church, belong, like Lamb Buildings, somewhat unexpectedly to the Middle Temple, but they have no immediate connection with Oliver Goldsmith. The bedroom in Goldsmith’s Chambers Thackeray describes as a mere closet, but he commented upon the excellence of the carved woodwork in the rooms. The windows looked upon a rookery, which for long flourished in the elm-trees, since cut down, which gave their name to Elm Court. Gazing upon this colony, Goldsmith, in the intervals of composing his ‘Traveller’ or ‘Deserted Village,’ would note their ways, and so recorded them in his ‘Animated Nature’:[35] ‘The rook builds in the neighbourhood of man, and sometimes makes choice of groves in the very midst of cities for the place of its retreat and security. In these it establishes a kind of legal constitution, by which all intruders are excluded from coming to live among them, and none suffered to build but acknowledged natives of the place. I have often amused myself with observing their plan of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks upon a grove where they have made a colony in the midst of the City....’ In recent years many of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar have had Chambers in Brick Court, including Lord Coleridge, Lord Bowen, Lord Russell, and Sir William Anson. There is a sundial in this Court--one of the many for which the Inn is famous--from which Goldsmith may often have taken the hour. It warns us that Time and Tide tarry for no man, and took the place (1704) of one that bore the motto, ‘Begone about your business,’ of which the story goes that it was a Bencher’s curt dismissal of a Mason who asked him for the motto to be engraved thereon. The Buildings in the Inns grew up in haphazard fashion. They were erected by individual members or Benchers at their own cost, and interspersed with stalls and shops, with the sanction of the Benchers. The builders were granted the right of calling their blocks of chambers after their own names, if they chose, and of nominating a certain number of successors from among members of the Society, who might become tenants without paying rent to the Inn. To this haphazard method of building, and to the influence of numerous fires, is due the devious labyrinth of little Courts, the inextricable maze of blocks of Chambers, which lie upon our left as we descend Middle Temple Lane, and which lend so peculiar a character to the Temple Inns. Pump Court, Elm Court, Fig-Tree Court, which fill the spaces between the Lane and Wren’s Cloisters and the Inner Temple Hall, owe their irregular shape to these causes, and their titles to the chief features of the plots about which they were built.