The grey walls of Paper Buildings; the plain yellow brick of Crown Office Row; the stock-brick of Mitre Court, the Goldsmith Buildings that have supplanted the dingy attic of No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, which looked through the trees upon the (now vanished) pump in Hare Court, are none of them buildings which in themselves can stir any emotion but repulsion, but they have a lasting charm and interest, for they are the sites of the homes of Elia; they are haunted by the ‘old familiar faces’ of Charles Lamb and his friends. Charles Lamb first saw the light in No. 2, Crown Office Row, ‘right opposite the stately stream which washes the garden-foot,’ and there passed the first seven years of his life. ‘Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said, for in those young years what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are of my earliest recollections.’ The name of these buildings was derived naturally enough, because, at least from the days of Henry VII., the Clerk of the Crown occupied the Crown Office in this Inn until its removal to the Courts of Justice in 1882. The eastern yellow brick half of the row, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, was built in 1737, the western half, Nos. 4, 5, and 6, of stone in the Italian style, in 1864, by Sydney Smirke. The Row no longer extends to No. 10, where Thackeray had chambers, sharing them possibly with Tom Taylor, before he migrated to No. 2, Brick Court. Of his old Chambers here Taylor wrote with affectionate regret when he heard of the ‘bringing low of those old chambers, dear old friend, at Ten, Crown Office Row.’ ‘They were fusty, they were musty, they were grimy, dull, and dim, The paint scaled off the panelling, the stairs were all untrim; The flooring creaked, the windows gaped, the doorposts stood awry, The wind whipt round the corner with a wild and wailing cry. In a dingier set of chambers no man need wish to stow, Than those, old friend, wherein we denned at Ten, Crown Office Row.’ The present Mitre Court Buildings date from 1830. At No. 16, in the old block, Charles Lamb once lived (1800), preferring ‘the attic story for the air.’ ‘Bring your glass,’ he writes to a friend, ‘and I will show you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river, so as by perking upon my haunches and supporting my carcass upon my elbows, without much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of King’s Bench Walk, as I lie in my bed.’ In Fuller’s Rents, now replaced by Nos. 1 and 2, Mitre Court Buildings, the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s favourite, and Sir Edward Coke, the great Chief Justice, once had chambers (1588 _ff._).[42] Coke was a Bencher before he became Chief Justice and wrote upon Lyttleton. Sir Thomas Lyttleton (author of the famous ‘Treatise on Tenures’) is the first name upon the list of the Benchers of the Inner Temple.