ss, consisting of four persons, and each mess is allowed a bottle of
port wine. Dinner is served daily to the members of the Inn during
term-time,--the masters of the bench dining on the dais, and the
barristers and students at long tables extending down the hall. On grand
days the judges are present, who dine in succession with each of the four
Inns of Court. To the parliament chamber, adjoining the hall, the benchers
repair after dinner. The 'loving-cups' used on certain grand occasions are
huge silver goblets, which are passed down the table filled with a
delicious composition, immemorially termed 'sack,' consisting of sweetened
and exquisitely flavored white wine. The butler attends the progress of
the cup to replenish it, and each student is by rule restricted to a sip;
yet it is recorded that once, though the number present fell short of
seventy, thirty-six quarts of the liquid were sipped away. At the Inner
Temple, on May 29, a gold cup of sack is handed to each member, who drinks
to the happy restoration of Charles II."

The Temple has been for generations a favorite abode with men of letters
and others having no leaning toward or connection with the bar. It is a
vast bachelors' hall. Fleet Street and its immediate vicinity is the
centre of the publishing interest of London. Here many of the great
dailies are edited and printed, and "Brain Street," as George Augustus
Sala fitly nicknamed it, is midway between the "city" and the "West End,
"--the "down town" and the "up town" of London, if such a simile is
permissible as applied to a brick-and-mortar polypus whose members radiate
toward every point of the compass. No part of the Temple is more than five
minutes' walk from this centre of intellectual industry, and yet, once
within its walls, the silence and seclusion are complete. The roar and
rattle of Fleet Street and the Strand might be a thousand miles away, for
scarce a murmur penetrates beyond the Temple gates. The quiet, stone-paved
courts, the grassy nooks gemmed with a few choice blossoms, the
soft-plashing fountains, overshadowed by sturdy elm-, plane-, or fig-trees,
the cool stone archways leading from one court to another, the park-like
expanse of the Temple Garden, bounded by the bustling Embankment and the
swift-flowing river, are surroundings favorable alike to the labors of a
busy journalist, to the novelist's weavings of fiction, to the poet's
subtile creations, to the purposeful studies of the pati