Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/498

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Temple Students and Temple Studies. the value of early and diligent application to study. It is a pity that so excellent a moralist should have been so greatly ad dicted to drink. Later allusions to the place by Addison, Steele and Goldsmith are too well known to need repeating. As we have seen in Coke's time, and for long afterwards, the Temple stairs at the foot of the walks were a well-known hiding place for boats in

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"Temple Toasts." The Inns have always kept some tinge of their old masters' asceti cism, although the presence of lady residents was at one time not unknown. The fact that old Mrs. Dunning was murdered in Tanfield Court by Sarah Malcolm in 1732 proves this. But Sarah, although Hogarth sketched her, is not an example of Temple femininity on whom we would lay any stress.

TEMPLE GARDENS.

days when it was easier to travel to White hall or Westminster by the waterway than by a road which was often knee-deep in mud. Now the steamboat ousts the wherry, covering the trees of the garden with its grime; while nearer still, along the bank, runs an underground railway, the sleepers here being placed on layers of tan to deaden the sound of passing trains. The name of Mrs. Bracegirdle suggests the fact that very pretty reading might be made, in competent hands, of a collection of

Yet she had her vogue, if a short one, when a copy of her confession sold for twenty guineas — in itself a temptation to the liter ary to commit manslaughter — and Walpole himself paid five pounds for her portrait. Now her story is in the " Gentleman's Maga zine " and her skeleton in the Botanic Gar dens, Cambridge. If the Templar's toasts were few they were pleasing, and of his own choosing. He was not like Shallow, "ever in the rearward of the fashion," nor like Falstaff, indiscriminate.