It brings before us, not only the vision of the great Justiciars who transacted the business of the King’s Courts, of the great Lawyers who built up the mighty fabric of English Law, and the great Judges who defended the rights and liberties and progress of the people, but also many of the greatest names in literature and architecture. The precincts of the Temple remind us of the Order of the Red-Cross Knights, and near at hand are the vacated Inns of that other Order which has been likewise dissolved. For we see no more, save in the light of imagination, either the mail-clad figures of the Templars in their white cloaks stamped with the red cross, or the Serjeants in their white lawn coifs and parti-coloured gowns, wending their way from the Temple Hall to the shrine of St. Thomas. The silver tongue of Harcourt is mute as the impassioned eloquence of Burke and Sheridan, yet these buildings seem to echo with their voices, with the sonorous declamation of Dr. Johnson, or the witty stammer of Charles Lamb. There, in Gray’s Inn, we still seem to see the figure of Francis Bacon, pacing the walks with Raleigh, talking of trees and politics and high adventure; from the Gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, and past the red bricks laid by Ben Jonson, when Wolsey was Cardinal, the form of Sir Thomas More emerges; and across the way the thin, alert figure of Sir Edward Coke steps briskly from his tiny garden into Old Serjeants’ Inn. Here Dickens talks with Thackeray, and Blackstone scowls at Goldsmith; there, in the Middle Temple Hall, Queen Elizabeth leads the dance with Sir Christopher Hatton, and the rafters ring with the music of Shakespeare’s voice and Shakespeare’s poetry. And the buildings themselves are the works of a noble army of English Architects, admirable creations and memorials of the genius of Sir Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones, Adam, Hardwick, Street, and of the unknown builders of Norman, Gothic, and Elizabethan things. These facts once known, not all the dirt and fog of London air, not all the noise and distraction of City business and legal affairs, can ever again wholly obscure the charm, the romance, the historical and literary associations, which haunt these homes of so many great English Lawyers, Writers, and Administrators. APPENDIX The following is a list of the chief authorities referred to in the foregoing pages: