Lamb was a true child of the Temple as he was born there. It may be heresy, but I have always wished he had not called it “the most elegant spot in the metropolis”; he loved it more than that, as all readers of _The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple_ know well. No one leaves the Temple without pausing in Fountain Court, where Ruth Pinch used to meet Tom. It is by far the most charming of all the courts of the Temple. “I lived in Fountain Court for ten years,” wrote Arthur Symons, “and I thought then and I think still, that it is the most beautiful place in London.” CHAPTER IV ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER “I do not like the Tower, of any place.”--_Richard III._ Having amused myself many times in Paris by hunting up the pieces of the old wall that Philippe Auguste built before he departed to the Holy Land on one of his Crusades, I set out one day to see how much remains of the wall the Romans built round London. I discovered some bits of it, but I discovered a great many other things in the process. There is very little left of the city that the old Romans called Augusta and the older Britons Llyn-Din--that some say means “the Lake Fort” and some “The Hill by the Pool.” In the Guildhall and London museums there are statues and vases and ornaments and mosaic pavements belonging to those times, but in the city streets there are hardly any traces to-day of the Roman occupation. Watling Street, a piece of Roman road that still bears an Anglo-Saxon name, runs citywards from the back of St. Paul’s, but that may better be reached from Cheapside. Most of the Roman wall that remains is now below ground level. The best places to see what is visible are in St. Olave’s, Hart Street; at Trinity Place, Tower Hill; at Barber’s bonded warehouses in Cooper’s Row; and at The Roman Wall House at No. 1, Crutched Friars, a new building whose plans were altered by the Sadlers’ Company so as to preserve a good specimen of the old wall in one of the basement rooms. I began my search for Roman remains in Strand Lane, which lies next door to the Strand station on the Holborn tube, and can be reached either by bus along the Strand or by District train to the Temple, whence you go uphill up Arundel Street and, turning to your left along the Strand, find it after two or three minutes’ walk. Half-way down the little winding passage that once led to the waterside there is on the left a dingy sign, “The Old Roman Bath.” The English reputation for liking cold baths must have been a legacy from the Romans. Time was when the venerable cold spring bath was used daily. David Copperfield had many a cold plunge in it when he was living in Peter the Great’s house at the lower end of Buckingham Street. But now it is only open from 11 to 12 on Saturday mornings to the very occasional visitor who turns aside to look at this 2,000-year-old relic of the London of the past.