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The Library of the Middle Temple. therefore in his Maj»« name to command you forthwith to apprehend and bring the Body of the said John Bunnion bee fore us, or any of us, or other his Majiies Justice of the peace within the said County, to answer the premisses, and further to doe and receave as to Lawe and Justice shall appertaine, and hereof you are not to faile. Given under our hands and seals this Fowerth day of March in the seaven and twentieth yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second. An 93 D". juxta & 1674. Witt Spencer. Will Gery. Sl Jo. Chernocke. W»- Daniel. T. Browne. W. Foster. Gaius Squier. Blessed warrant! For in those hours of enforced seclusion from the world in Bedford gaol, hours which might otherwise have been dissipated in field preaching, the inspired tinker dreamed that dream — the immortal allegory whose charm no time can wither or custom stale. What a procession of illustrious figures — members of the Middle Temple — have passed through that library — the old and the new — and turned over its treasures of learning since Ashley's day! Men illustrious not only in law, but in literature, in arts and eloquence. Studious John Evelyn, the Diarist, who had chambers in Essex Court, overlooking the old library, must have dipped into many a curious volume there, albeit he spent his Temple period, he tells us remorsefully, in "dancing and fooling" more than in study. Clarendon must have visited it when he was sketching his "History of the Rebellion." Edmund Burke must have used it when, be fore he had "soared to the empyrean," he was busy editing that useful publication — the "Annual Register." Blackstone must con-
stantly have turned to its bookshelves when 485 he was writing his stately Commentaries, and Lord Hardwicke when he was preparing his luminous judgments. Lord Eldon must have found in it the materials for his famous argument in Ackroyd v. Smithson, and his brother, Lord Stowell, laid there the founda tions of his unrivalled learning in ecclesias tical and maritime law and in the law of na tions,— a debt afterwards acknowledged and repaid in his splendid bequest to the library. Sheridan doubtless consulted its shelves when he was preparing himself to deliver his famous Begum oration; and may not even the butterfly muse of Tom Moore — for he, too, was a member — have alighted in these "dusty purlieus of the law? " There have come Talfourd and Mansfield and Curran, Leach and Jekyll and Erle, Wynford and Pollock and Ashburton, Grattan and Jervk and Gifford, Charles Dickens and Thackeray, the brilliant Cockburn and the silver-tongued Coleridge. And to-day the Inn has still names worthy to rank with those of the past, Lord Lindley and Sir Richard Henn Collins, the New Master of the Rolls, Mr. Justice Wills and Mr. Justice Phillimore,— still the torch of learning is being handed on. Gibbon, in his Autobiography, has re corded his regret that he had never engrafted himself on one of the great professions. The phrase is a striking one, and carries a pro found truth. From great institutions, their traditional glories, their immortal vitality, we draw an inspiration and a strength which, if it does not always lead on to victory, digni fies and ennobles the individual life.
