In Elizabeth's day the Middle Temple abandoned the old Templar arms--a red cross on a silver shield with a lamb bearing the sacred banner surmounted by a red cross--and substituted a flying Pegasus. Both of these emblems meet the visitor's eye as he winds through the labyrinthine passages of the old quadrangles, and comes at every step upon some spot rich with the associations of centuries.
Of the well-known story of the origin of the Wars of the Roses within the Temple Gardens it is not necessary here to speak.
An old print of Milton's later years shows the gardens of the Inner Temple laid out in many straight rows of trees, like apple-trees in orchards, which extended down to the wall that bordered the Thames. North, toward Fleet Street, rows upon rows of gabled houses, four stories in height, enclosed quadrangles and courts. The dining-halls, built in the Tudor period, stand as they stood when Spenser, in the generation before Milton, wrote of--
"those bricky towers, The which on Thames' broad back do ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers; There whilom wont the Temple knights to bide Till they decayed through pride."
The little Fountain in Fountain Court is dear to lovers of Dickens, for here Ruth Pinch tripped by with merry heart to meet her lover. In Queen Anne's time, a fountain of much loftier altitude sparkled and splashed here, and for aught we know made music when Milton and Shakespeare wandered within the Temple precincts.
It was not until after Milton's birth that James I. in 1609 granted the whole property to the two societies of the Inner and Middle Temples; whereupon they presented his Majesty with a precious gold cup of great weight, which cup was esteemed by the monarch as one of his most valued treasures. When the king's daughter Elizabeth was married four years later, the Temple and Gray's Inn men gave a masque, which Sir Francis Bacon planned and executed. The bridal party came by water and landed at the foot of the Temple Gardens amid peals of the little cannon of that day, and with great pomp and merriment. The king gave a supper to the forty masquers. This masque, however, did not compare in splendour with the one given twenty years later, and already alluded to, which was planned by members of the Inns of Court meeting in Ely Place.