First comes Pump Court, where Henry Fielding, the novelist, and Cowper, the poet, once had chambers. Upon its old brick walls is a sundial with its warning motto: ‘Shadows we are, and like shadows depart.’[36] The great fire of 1679, which damaged the Middle Temple far more than the Fire of London, broke out at midnight in Pump Court. It raged for twelve hours. The Thames was frozen, and barrels of ale, so tradition runs, were broached to feed the pumping engines in lieu of water. Pump Court, Elm-Tree Court, Vine Court, the Cloisters, and part of Brick Court were consumed. The Church and Middle Temple Hall were only saved by the timely use of gunpowder, a device that had been found effective in the Great Fire of 1666. Elm Court Buildings, as they now are, date from 1880. They are built of good red brick and stone, but marred by feeble Renaissance ornament. They boast a sundial, facing the Lane, which proclaims that the years pass and are reckoned--_pereunt et imputantur_. The Middle Temple Lane ends in the atrocities of the nineteenth century: between the walls of the feeble Harcourt Buildings, the stock-brick ugliness of Plowden Buildings, which have rather less architectural charm than a soap-factory, and in the dreadful Temple Gardens and the Gateway which opens upon the Embankment, a gross abomination of florid ugliness. On the right, below Brick Court, beneath a gas-lamp raised upon a graceful iron arch, some steps [Illustration: FOUNTAIN COURT AND MIDDLE TEMPLE HALL] lead us to a raised pavement, dotted with a few plane-trees, beyond which lies the Fountain. This pavement is the forecourt of the Middle Temple Hall, a building which, in spite of restorations and recasings and counter-restorations, remains of unique and unsurpassed interest. For now that Crosby Hall is to be translated, it is the only building left _in situ_ in London which can be directly and certainly connected with William Shakespeare. The Middle Temples had an ancient Hall between Pump Court and Elm Court, the west end of which abutted upon Middle Temple Lane. This was superseded in 1572 by the present famous building. ‘Gray’s Inn for walks, Lincoln’s Inn for a wall, The Inner Temple for a garden, And the Middle for a Hall.’ The old doggerel lines fairly sum up the features of the Inns. And this lovely Hall of the Middle Temple, whose proportions are so fair--it is 100 feet by 42 feet by 47 feet high--produces a delightful impression of space and lightness. A magnificent timber roof with Elizabethan hammer-beams harmonizes with the rich panelling, on which are painted the arms of ‘Readers,’ and the gorgeous carving of the Renaissance Screen, which was erected in 1574, some fourteen years before the date of the Spanish Armada, from the spoils of which fond tradition says it was constructed.