No. 1 BRICK COURT, MIDDLE TEMPLE

CHANGES in the Temple being happily infrequent, a great

many buildings are preserved upon this historic ground which date back two or three centuries. In point of age, there is nothing in its surviving domestic architecture to keep company either with the "Round" of the famous church, or that unrivalled specimen of Elizabethan craftsmanship, the Middle Temple Hall, but the fine old house, No. 1 Brick Court, which was demolished so recently as the spring of 1908, might have claimed at least a respectable antiquity.

A tradition long existed that this actual building was standing when Edmund Spenser, in his exquisite Prothalamion,"

noted the rise of

"those bricky towres

The which on Themmes brode aged back doe ryde,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templar Knights to byde
Till they decayd through pride."

It is the fact that the earliest brick buildings in the Temple were erected upon this site. In the Records of the Middle Temple Parliament, edited by Mr. Hopwood, Q.C., will be found under date November 26, 1569, an entry that Thomas Daniell, who was Treasurer early in Queen Elizabeth's reign, having spent much labour and money on the new Bricke buyldinges,' his nephew, John Daniell, shall be admitted to any vacant chamber which pleases him without fines." The ascription

of No. 1 Brick Court to Daniell was repeated in a dozen quarters when the house came down, but from an examination of maps and records there is little doubt that the tradition is unfounded. The house probably dated about a century later, when there was a good deal of pulling down and rebuilding. In 1678 the Parliament ordered, "that Brick Court and the garden on the north side of it shall be made one court, and buildings erected on all sides of it."

No. 1 Brick Court was a roomy old house, very substantially built, and of excellent proportions, but displaying practically nothing in the way of adornment. Its façade certainly suggested a Stuart rather than an Elizabethan origin. An almost identical house still stands at the side, overlooking Fountain Court and the Middle Temple Hall. Among famous legal occupants of No. 1 have been Thesiger, a remarkable man appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal at the age of thirty-nine, and in later years Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Bowen, who shared chambers there with him.

Although centrally situated in the Temple, which the lawyers have occupied ever since the Knights Templars were displaced, Brick Court will always remain famous for its literary rather than its legal associations. Oliver Goldsmith took a life lease of chambers on the second floor of No. 2 in 1768. There he wrote The Deserted Village," there he gave his pleasant parties, which Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and others attended; and there he died on April 4th, 1774. A plaque on the outer walls marks the rooms. Later Winthrop Mackworth Praed and Thackeray came to the same building.

W. B.