e sky, while the massive proportions of the "water
front" of Somerset House, the motley groupings of the structures that
crowd the intervening water-side, and the flashing river hound by
many-arched bridges, fill the middle distance.

Aside from the lustre shed around its history by many eminent lawyers and
jurists, the Middle Temple has numbered among its students several great
poets and dramatists, notably John Ford, William Congreve, Nicholas Rowe,
Thomas Shadwell, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Moore. But, as
their literary remains prove, few or none of them prosecuted their legal
studies with that sedulous devotion which the law, proverbially a jealous
mistress, demands. Sir William Blackstone, who immortalized his name by
his "Commentaries on the Laws of England," was educated in the Middle
Temple, where he was entered as a student, November 20, 1741, and by which
he was called to the bar, April 26, 1750. In his Temple chambers, ere he
finally consecrated his massive intellect to the legal profession,
Blackstone wrote the famous "Farewell to the Muses:"

Lull'd by the lapse of gliding floods,
Cheer'd by the warbling of the woods,
How blest my days, my thoughts how free,
In sweet society with thee!
Then all was joyous, all was young,
And years, unheeded, roll'd along;
But now the pleasing dream is o'er,--
These scenes must charm me now no more.
Lost to the field and torn from you,
Farewell! a long, a last adieu.

Edmund Burke was entered at the Middle Temple in 1747, and kept his terms
in 1750. But the great tribune was never called to the bar. Had he been,
what a powerful advocate, what a pitiless adversary, he would have made!
Porson, the brilliant but bibulous classicist, has left behind him many
sad stories of his pranks during his residence in Essex Court, where he
had chambers immediately above those occupied by the future Baron Gurney,
whom, in one of his debauches, he came near burning in his bed. Chaucer is
believed to have entered as a student of the Middle Temple, where he is
supposed to have formed a friendship with the "moral Gower." Sir Walter
Raleigh, Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Edward Bramston, Lord-Keeper Guildford,
Edmund Plowden,--perhaps the greatest lawyer of the Elizabethan epoch,
--"Ugly" Dunning, who afterward became Lord Ashburton, and Lord Eldon, are
among the ornaments of the British bench and bar who sprung from the
Mid