Temple Bar was removed about forty years since; but if you traverse the Strand, and, leaving the jostle of the Strand behind you, venture on--past Mr. Gladstone's statue and the two churches which part the streaming traffic as rocks part the waters of a river--you will become suddenly aware of two pointed wings and a grotesque dragon-shaped head showing black between high buildings against a narrow slip of sky. This is the "Griffin." He stands where Temple Bar stood. Above him tower the clock and gray pinnacles of the law courts. Westward, he looks toward the seethe of near Aldwych, and far Trafalgar Square. Behind him clang the news-presses of Fleet Street. At his right wing and his left you will find the advocates of our law; "barristers," as we call them. They are not quite of the every-day world, these barristers. Their minds, even their bodies, seem to move more precisely. The past influences them rather than the present. Sentimentality influences them hardly at all. At home--even now very few of them live at the wings of the Griffin--these men may be lovers, husbands, friends. Here they are advocates of a code, a selected body, inheritors of a six-hundred-year-old tradition. Very pleasant fellows on the whole: not at all inhuman; only--as befits their calling--a little aloof. It may perhaps help our stranger to understand this aloofness if, turning southward from the Griffin down the clefts of Inner or Middle Temple Lane, he will explore some of the "courts" where these barristers of ours have their "chambers"--Hare Court, Pump Court, Fountain Court, Miter Court, and the rest. Here, not a newsboy's shout from Fleet Street, our exploring stranger will find a veritable sanctum of time-defying quiet--red-brick and gray-stone houses, paved or graveled walks, fountains, courtyards, trees, gardens, cloisters, colonnades, and quadrangles; the whole set, as though it were a symbol of tradition controlling progress, midway between the moneyed "City" and the governing "West End." But the quiet of the Temple--Gray's Inn and Clifford's Inn lie north of the Griffin and beyond our story--is an illusive quiet; the quiet of good manners concealing busyness. If you watch the faces of the men who walk those graveled courtyards, you will see them as obsessed by thought as the faces of any merchant in the moneyed City. If you climb the uncarpeted stairs of those Georgian houses, and read the names painted in block letters on the doors, you will find many whom the clanging presses of Fleet Street have made familiar--and many, many more to whom even the fame of Fleet Street has never come. * * * * *