NUMBER ONE.

A REMINISCENCE OF LAST YEAR'S ACADEMY.

I sincerely envy him

Who the fortune had to limn

Her bewitching hazel eyes
With his brush:

Who could study ev'ry grace

In her winsome little face,

And the subtle charm that lies
In her blush.

I am sure it is a shame

That your pretty face and frame,
Ruthless hangers out of view
Seek to hide :

But perhaps Sir Francis G—

And his myrmidons agree,

Peerless angels such as you—
Should be "skyed"!

Ah! were I but twenty-two

I would hinge the knee to you
And most humbly kiss your glove,
At your throne :

Thrice happy he whose sighs

Draw this sweet Heart Union prize

In the lottery of Love
For his own!

If I knew but your papa,
Could I only "ask mamma,"
It is clear enough to me
As the sun

That all thro' this weary life,

Mid its pleasure, pain, and strife,

All my care and love should be

"Number One."

J. ASHBY-STERRY.

LIFE IN LONDON.

VI.-AT TEMPLE BAR.

HE old gateway is on its last legs. The new Law Courts will assuredly rise up some day and show their fair proportions to the Strand. Despite satirist and burlesque writer, the new buildings are going on. The hoarding of Willing will one day fall before the command of the chief stonemason; and then may Temple Bar look its last upon Fleet Street. All the antiquarians of London, all the dry-as-dust philosophers in the country, will step forth and do battle for the ancient gateway. They will write to Notes and Queries; they will invoke the shade of SYLVANUS URBAN; they will move to wrath the committees of their learned societies; but the Corporation of London will come down and carry away the old place, and set it up in some quiet retreat where we can go and look at it and moralise about it, and recall the times when we remember passing under it, with that everlasting crowd, out of which John Bright said six hundred and fifty men might be picked any day as good and capable of government as the gentlemen who occupy the House of Commons.

With every man who has the slightest veneration in his compound of qualities and sensibilities, I shall respect the old gateway; but I shall not regret to find it elsewhere. Let it be taken to the Temple Gardens, or put up in one of the parks; I would rather it did not go to the Crystal Palace; I do not want to see it standing out in the back-yard of South Kensington; but I shall be prepared to sit in its shadow on the grass of Hyde Park, or under the trees of Epping Forest. At present it is out of place altogether. The world has gone past it. Its days are over. The "poor low wretches" who sold cheap newspapers in 1740, and provided Hogarth with the Farthing Post for the fourth plate of the "Rake's Progress," are no more; nay, it has become respectable to print and sell halfpenny and penny papers.

We do not punish traitors nowadays, partly because we do not fear them, and further because they only talk nonsense and mean it. They gather "in their thousands," and we stand by and listen to their absurdities; if a general election is at hand great men in office even give them audience; and weaker men let them assist in park VOL. X. N.S., 1873.

R R

improvements. In the merry days of Charles we should have hanged and quartered them, and decorated Temple Bar with their remains. But even the sternest opponent of Radical leagues would hardly care to see Mr. Bradlaugh contributing such articles to Temple Bar. Nor would this ambitious gentleman, I am sure, desire to put Mr. Hopkins to such severe exposure. No, these are not the days for Temple Bar. Let it go. It will never again see so glorious a day as that when Queen Victoria and her royal son last passed beneath its portal, her pathway strewn with violets; while Mr. John Bennett, trying to sit gracefully on a white horse, was curvetting on his way to knighthood. Moreover, authors are gentlemen now, although they write for penny papers; the overhanging gables that made a brave oldfashioned show are gone; barbers have given over blood-letting, and they brush hair by machinery; German beer and American drinks are sold in Fleet Street; locomotive engines rush over Ludgate Hill; SYLVANUS URBAN has laid aside his buckled shoes and ruffles to take his place with modern men and manners; a French emperor dies in our midst, and we weep tears of sorrow over his bier; we send letters by lightning to all parts of the world, communicating with the antipodes beneath the ocean in a shorter time than it used to take to travel to Oxford; therefore have we done with Temple Bar. Let it be put away in some quiet corner, a relic of the past, and give room for the great human tide of life ebbing to and fro between the shop and the villa, the City and the sweet West-end of town.

At night, on that Thanksgiving Day, which already seems to be years ago events move so quickly in these electrical days-the cruel Bar pinched and crushed people to death, suffocating them in its narrow ways, jealous perhaps of the people's freedom to come and go. I would have it removed, if for no other reason; as I would have stocks and ducking-stools, stakes and bull-rings, if they existed; for, after all, it represents little else in history but a gibbet. There is not one single glorious association connected with it. Even from an antiquarian point of view it is an impostor. It is only two hundred years old. I will take you to an archway at Lincoln that was built before Christ; and yet we gaze at this crumbling Golgotha that stands in the way of London street progress, and talk of its ancient and historical associations. A hundred years ago John Gwynn, author of "London and Westminster Improved," and of many improvements afterwards carried out on his suggestions, advocated the removal of Temple Bar. He denounced it as the greatest nuisance of all the City gates, and the Bar had a narrow escape at that time. In 1759 the City went so far in their scheme of removal

as to make provision for the lessees to quit possession; and again in 1789 its doom was almost sealed. In 1868 a newspaper reporter with his perceptive faculties in full operation, discovered a crack in the Bar; but unhappily it turned out only to be some of the mortar worked out of the stones on the occasion of the decorations in honour of the Sultan of Turkey. The false alarm, however, was made the occasion of a discussion by the Corporation, which ended in the Lord Mayor advising his civic brethren to wait and see what would come out of the new Law Courts scheme. Five years have elapsed, and we are still waiting, but we cannot have much longer to wait.

Meanwhile let us glance for a moment at the most notable associations of Temple Bar; let us try and see for what reason men cry out "Save this splendid relic of the past, this trophy of London history, this gate of our fathers, this grand piece of antiquity." Its only claim to ancient lineage is derived from its site, on which ground any apple-stall may compete with it; while its historical character is a story which England might well desire to have blotted out for ever. It is the modern successor of the ancient Traitor's Gate, which flourished and did a good business on London Bridge five hundred years ago. As Mr. T. C. Noble, in his interesting "Memorials of Temple Bar," is careful to mention, "We are indebted to His Majesty of glorious memory, Charles II., for immortalising Temple Bar, by transferring to it the ancient glories of Traitor's Gate." Sir Thomas Armstrong was the first victim who helped to make Temple Bar historical. A Rye-house plotter, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered; his head was set up over Westminster Hall, between those of Cromwell and Bradshaw, and one of his quarters was spiked on Temple Bar; two others were put up over Aldgate and Aldersgate; and the fourth went to Stafford, which town Sir Thomas had represented in Parliament. The gay King, it is reported, presented Judge Jeffries with a bloodstone in memory of this excellent judgment and sentence. Sir William Parkyns and Sir John Freind, leaders in the plot to seize the King while hunting between Brentford and Turnham Green, were the next contributors to the bloody history of Temple Bar. They were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in March, 1696, and Evelyn has the following note of the circumstance :-" April 10, 1696. The quarters of Sir William Perkins and Sir John Freind, lately executed in the plot, with Perkins's head, were set up at Temple Bar, a dismal sight which many pitied. I think there never was such a Temple Bar till now, except once, in the time of Charles II., viz., Sir Thomas