LIFE IN LONDON.

VI. AT TEMPLE BAR.

HE old gateway is on its last legs. The new Law Courts will assuredly rise up some day and show their fair proportions to the Strand. Despite satirist and burlesque writer, the new buildings are going on. The hoarding of Willing will one day fall before the command of the chief stonemason; and then may Temple Bar look its last upon Fleet Street. All the antiquarians of London, all the dry-as-dust philosophers in the country, will step forth and do battle for the ancient gateway. They will write to Notes and Queries; they will invoke the shade of SYLVANUS URBAN; they will move to wrath the committees of their learned societies; but the Corporation of London will come down and carry away the old place, and set it up in some quiet retreat where we can go and look at it and moralise about it, and recall the times when we remember passing under it, with that everlasting crowd, out of which John Bright said six hundred and fifty men might be picked any day as good and capable of government as the gentlemen who Occupy the House of Commons.

With every man who has the slightest veneration in his compound of qualities and sensibilities, I shall respect the old gateway; but I shall not regret to find it elsewhere. Let it be taken to the Temple Gardens, or put up in one of the parks; I would rather it did not go to the Crystal Palace; I do not want to see it standing out in the back-yard of South Kensington; but I shall be prepared to sit in its shadow on the grass of Hyde Park, or under the trees of Epping Forest. At present it is out of place altogether. The world has gone past it. Its days are over. The "poor low wretches" who sold cheap newspapers in 1740, and provided Hogarth with the Farthing Post for the fourth plate of the "Rake's Progress," are no more; nay, it has become respectable to print and sell halfpenny and penny papers.

We do not punish traitors nowadays, partly because we do not fear them, and further because they only talk nonsense and mean it. They gather "in their thousands," and we stand by and listen to their absurdities; if a general election is at hand great men in office even give them audience; and weaker men let them assist in park VOL. X. N.S., 1873.

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improvements. In the merry days of Charles we should have hanged and quartered them, and decorated Temple Bar with their remains. But even the sternest opponent of Radical leagues would hardly care to see Mr. Bradlaugh contributing such articles to Temple Bar. Nor would this ambitious gentleman, I am sure, desire to put Mr. Hopkins to such severe exposure. No, these are not the days for Temple Bar. Let it go. It will never again see so glorious a day as that when Queen Victoria and her royal son last passed beneath its portal, her pathway strewn with violets; while Mr. John Bennett, trying to sit gracefully on a white horse, was curvetting on his way to knighthood. Moreover, authors are gentlemen now, although they write for penny papers; the overhanging gables that made a brave oldfashioned show are gone; barbers have given over blood-letting, and they brush hair by machinery; German beer and American drinks are sold in Fleet Street; locomotive engines rush over Ludgate Hill; SYLVANUS URBAN has laid aside his buckled shoes and ruffles to take his place with modern men and manners; a French emperor dies in our midst, and we weep tears of sorrow over his bier; we send letters by lightning to all parts of the world, communicating with the antipodes beneath the ocean in a shorter time than it used to take to travel to Oxford; therefore have we done with Temple Bar. Let it be put away in some quiet corner, a relic of the past, and give room for the great human tide of life ebbing to and fro between the shop and the villa, the City and the sweet West-end of town.

At night, on that Thanksgiving Day, which already seems to be years ago events move so quickly in these electrical days-the cruel Bar pinched and crushed people to death, suffocating them in its narrow ways, jealous perhaps of the people's freedom to come and go. I would have it removed, if for no other reason; as I would have stocks and ducking-stools, stakes and bull-rings, if they existed; for, after all, it represents little else in history but a gibbet. There is not one single glorious association connected with it. Even from an antiquarian point of view it is an impostor. It is only two hundred years old. I will take you to an archway at Lincoln that was built before Christ; and yet we gaze at this crumbling Golgotha that stands in the way of London street progress, and talk of its ancient and historical associations. A hundred years ago John Gwynn, author of "London and Westminster Improved," and of many improvements afterwards carried out on his suggestions, advocated the removal of Temple Bar. He denounced it as the greatest nuisance of all the City gates, and the Bar had a narrow escape at that time. In 1759 the City went so far in their scheme of removal

as to make provision for the lessees to quit possession; and again in 1789 its doom was almost sealed. In 1868 a newspaper reporter with his perceptive faculties in full operation, discovered a crack in the Bar; but unhappily it turned out only to be some of the mortar worked out of the stones on the occasion of the decorations in honour of the Sultan of Turkey. The false alarm, however, was made the occasion of a discussion by the Corporation, which ended in the Lord Mayor advising his civic brethren to wait and see what would come out of the new Law Courts scheme. Five years have elapsed, and we are still waiting, but we cannot have much longer to wait.

Meanwhile let us glance for a moment at the most notable associations of Temple Bar; let us try and see for what reason men cry out "Save this splendid relic of the past, this trophy of London history, this gate of our fathers, this grand piece of antiquity." Its only claim to ancient lineage is derived from its site, on which ground any apple-stall may compete with it; while its historical character is a story which England might well desire to have blotted out for ever. It is the modern successor of the ancient Traitor's Gate, which flourished and did a good business on London Bridge five hundred years ago. As Mr. T. C. Noble, in his interesting "Memorials of Temple Bar," is careful to mention, "We are indebted to His Majesty of glorious memory, Charles II., for immortalising Temple Bar, by transferring to it the ancient glories of Traitor's Gate." Sir Thomas Armstrong was the first victim who helped to make Temple Bar historical. A Rye-house plotter, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered; his head was set up over Westminster Hall, between those of Cromwell and Bradshaw, and one of his quarters was spiked on Temple Bar; two others were put up over Aldgate and Aldersgate; and the fourth went to Stafford, which town Sir Thomas had represented in Parliament. The gay King, it is reported, presented Judge Jeffries with a bloodstone in memory of this excellent judgment and sentence. Sir William Parkyns and Sir John Freind, leaders in the plot to seize the King while hunting between Brentford and Turnham Green, were the next contributors to the bloody history of Temple Bar. They were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in March, 1696, and Evelyn has the following note of the circumstance :-" April 10, 1696. The quarters of Sir William Perkins and Sir John Freind, lately executed in the plot, with Perkins's head, were set up at Temple Bar, a dismal sight which many pitied. I think there never was such a Temple Bar till now, except once, in the time of Charles II., viz., Sir Thomas

Armstrong." In 1715 the remains of Joseph Sullivan ornamented the gateway, his crime being the enlistment of men in the service of the Young Pretender. Near them a year afterwards the head of Henry Oxburg was spiked on the reeking Bar, presently to have a companion horror in the head of the misguided young Templar, Christopher Sayer. This latter was fixed there on the 18th May, 1723, “and here it remained blackened and weather beaten, till it seemed likely to be 'the oldest inhabitant."" I quote Mr. Noble, who quotes Mr. Wilson and Mr. Nicholls. 'Infancy had advanced into mature manhood," writes the former, "and still that head repulsively looked down from the summit of the arch. It seemed part of the arch itself. Soon, however, it had two neighbours; the times were too much out of joint to let Temple Bar have only a single exhibition. For thirty years the head of Counsellor Sayer remained in its place. One stormy night it blew down into the street. Some authorities say it was exhibited in a public-house, and then buried beneath the floor by Mr. John Pearce, a lawyer, who picked it up; but Dr. Rawlinson, the antiquary, bought it, as he believed, and ordered that it should be buried with him in his right hand at St. Giles's Church, Oxford." The heads of Townley and Fletcher, concerned in the rising of 1745, were spiked upon the Bar in 1746, and remained there until 1772. These were the heads to which Horace Walpole referred when he wrote, "I have been this morning at the Tower (August 16, 1746), and passed under the new heads at Temple Bar, where people make trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look."

Is it in memory of these things that we are to preserve Temple Bar? Do the gorgeous pageants which have halted here for civic rites make up for these ghastly memories? Fleet Street can treasure up the prouder incidents; but the existence of Temple Bar is needed to keep alive the horrors with which the locality is associated. It was suggested in a "Report on City Traffic" (1866), by Mr. Haywood, that "Fleet Street should be widened on both sides of the way, from Chancery Lane westward. At Temple Bar a circus should be formed, in the centre of which the Bar might be allowed to remain, thus retaining the ancient entrance to the City without its forming a hindrance to the traffic." Better that it were taken away to some quiet retired place, where one may go and visit it silently, and thank God we did not live in what were called "the good old times."

On highdays and holidays one sees living heads at the windows of Temple Bar. This room, as far back as the early history of the gateway,

has been let to Messrs. Child and Co., the bankers, who have access to it from their bank. The firm was established in the reign of Charles I., by Francis Child, a goldsmith, who married his master's daughter, and thus became rich. Nell Gwynne kept her banking account at Messrs. Child's, and Mr. Timbs has seen among the records of the firm the accounts of the partner Alderman Backwell for the sale of Dunkirk to the French. This is the oldest bank in London. It was originally known by the sign of the Marigold, which is still preserved in the bank. The house occupies the site of the "Devil Tavern," where Ben Jonson, no doubt, used to patronise sweet Will Shakespeare. Like this modern Temple Bar, Child's Bank is eclipsed by a previous building far more notable. "The Devil" was the resort of all the wits and poets of Jonson's time; and here in 1710 dined Dean Swift, Garth, and Addison. It was also the scene of Dr. Johnson's celebration of Mrs. Lennox's first literary child, upon which occasion, in honour of her book, he and the Ivy Lane Club crowned her with laurel and ate a magnificent hot apple-pie stuck with bay leaves, and there were pleasant conversation and drinking until daylight.

There are gates and gates, associations and associations. Temple Bar is a gate by itself, with an exceptional history. If it were even respectable, either as a piece of architecture or as a relic of the past, or in its historical memories, the treatment which it receives in the present day would degrade it to the level of a mere theatrical property. Let us go no farther back than Thanksgiving Day. Whitewashed, bedaubed with paint, its gates plastered with gold leaf or Dutch metal, it presented a sorry sight. Talk of the days of whitewashing churchwardens, Temple Bar, if it have any claim to respect or consideration, presents an exhibition of Vandalism quite equal to anything which antiquarian societies can lay to the account of parochial authorities in the last century. Even Charles Dickens, with all his veneration for old things, could only see Temple Bar in the light of a public nuisance. "The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old Corporation: Temple Bar."

To some of the readers of the Gentleman's Magazine it may seem odd that an article against Temple Bar should find a place in these pages. John Bull, for example, will probably shake his stupid old head and mumble a dull protest. Last month he objected to the Gentleman's because SYLVANUS URBAN does not devote himself to antiquities. Fiction, he thinks, is a desecration to this magazine.