 particularly favourable
to the growth of these feelings; for, not to mention the lazy influence of a
late and lonely breakfast, with the additional sedative of a newspaper, there
was an air of repose about his place of residence peculiar to itself, and which
hangs about it, even in these times, when it is more bustling and busy than it
was in days of yore.
    There are, still, worse places than the Temple, on a sultry day, for basking
in the sun, or resting idly in the shade. There is yet a drowsiness in its
courts, and a dreamy dulness in its trees and gardens; those who pace its lanes
and squares may yet hear the echoes of their footsteps on the sounding stones,
and read upon its gates, in passing from the tumult of the Strand or Fleet
Street, »Who enters here leaves noise behind.« There is still the plash of
falling water in fair Fountain Court, and there are yet nooks and corners where
dun-haunted students may look down from their dusty garrets, on a vagrant ray of
sunlight patching the shade of the tall houses, and seldom troubled to reflect a
passing stranger's form. There is yet, in the Temple, something of a clerkly
monkish atmosphere, which public offices of law have not disturbed, and even
legal firms have failed to scare away. In summer time, its pumps suggest to
thirsty idlers, springs cooler, and more sparkling, and deeper than other wells;
and as they trace the spillings of full pitchers on the heated ground, they
snuff the freshness, and, sighing, cast sad looks towards the Thames, and think
of baths and boats, and saunter on, despondent.
    It was in a room in Paper Buildings - a row of goodly tenements, shaded in
front by ancient trees, and looking, at the back, upon the Temple Gardens - that
this, our idler, lounged; now taking up again the paper he had laid down a
hundred times; now trifling with the fragments of his meal; now pulling forth
his golden toothpick, and glancing leisurely about the room, or out at window
into the trim garden walks, where a few early loiterers were already pacing to
and fro. Here a pair of lovers met to quarrel and make up; there a dark-eyed
nursery-maid had better eyes for Templars than her charge; on this hand an
ancient spinster, with her lapdog in a string, regarded both enormities with
scornful sidelong looks; on that a weazen old gentleman, ogling the
nursery-maid, looked with like scorn upon the spinster
