THE RED AND WHITE ROSES.

of coal barges,-a spot now pleasant and cheerful as a city promenade on summer evenings, and pointed out by Shakspere, as the place where the two emblems were plucked, under which the rival houses of York and Lancaster fought their civil war, and deluged the fields of England with English blood. We find the scene in the First Part of "Henry VI."

"SCENE.-London. The Temple Garden.

Enter the EARLS OF SOMERSET, SUFFOLK, and WARWICK;
RICHARD PLANTAGENET, VERNON and another Lawyer.
Plan. Great lords and gentlemen, what means this silence?
Dare no man answer in a case of truth?

Suf. Within the Temple-hall we were too loud:

The garden here is more convenient."

Plantagenet calls upon them to decide if he

"maintained the truth;

Or else was wrangling Somerset in the error?"

Suffolk declares himself a "truant in the law;" and Warwick, "the King-Maker," tells of his skill in solving other knotty points, but confesses the difficulty of the one he is called upon to settle:

"Between two hawks, which flies the higher pitch;
Between two dogs, which hath the deeper mouth;
Between two blades, which bears the better temper;
Between two horses, which doth bear him best;
Between two girls, which hath the merriest eye;
I have, perhaps, some shallow spirit of judgment:
But in these nice sharp quillets of the law,
Good faith I am no wiser than a daw."

The rival princes vaunt each the clearness of his own claim ; and silence greeting them, Plantagenet proposes the emblem :

"Since you are tongue-tied and so loath to speak,
In dumb significants proclaim your thoughts:

Let him that is a true-born gentleman,
And stands upon the honour of his birth,

If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,

From off this brier pluck a white rose with me.

Som. Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,

But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.

War. I love no colours; and, without all colour

Of base insinuating flattery,

I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet.

Suf. I pluck this red rose with young Somerset ;
And say withal, I think he held the right.

:

THE TEMPLE GARDENS.

Ver. Stay, lords and gentlemen, and pluck no more
Till you conclude that he upon whose side

The fewest roses are cropped from the tree,

Shall yield the other in the right opinion.

Som. Good Master Vernon, it is well objected:

If I have fewest, I subscribe in silence.

Plan. And I.

Ver. Then, for the truth and plainness of the case,
I pluck this pale and maiden blossom here,

Giving my verdict on the white rose side.

Som. Prick not your finger as you pluck it off;
Lest, bleeding, you do paint the white rose red,
And fall on my side so against your will.

Ver. If I, my lord, for my opinion bleed,
Opinion shall be surgeon to my hurt,
And keep me on the side where still I am.
Som. Well, well, come on: who else?
Law. Unless my study and my books be false,
The argument you held was wrong in you:

[To SOMERSET.

In sign whereof I pluck a white rose too.

Plan. Now, Somerset, where is your argument?
Som. Here in my scabbard, meditating that
Shall dye your white rose in a bloody red."

In later days, these gardens have been places of solace and recreation to Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Cowper, and, more

recently, to the gentle L. E. L. The first three were residents of the Temple; Johnson living in Inner Temple Lane, Goldsmith in Tanfield Court, Cowper in Paper Buildings. Goldsmith, -the versatile, witty, and good-hearted Goldsmith,-the writer

WHITEFRIARS-FORTUNES OF NIGEL.

"who touched upon all subjects, and touched none which he did not embellish,"-after a life of vicissitudes, rests in a corner of the Temple graveyard; and, in the Temple, Cowper, labouring under the morbid influence of disordered religious imaginings, twice attempted suicide. Neele, the author of the "Romance of History," likewise lived within these legal precincts, ending a short life by his own hand.

Charles Lamb, one of the purest, most truthful, and pleasantest of English writers, says: "I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river I had almost said— for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ?-these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:

·

'There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide,
Till they decayd through pride."

Passing the Temple and its associations, note those sooty buildings with the circular iron receivers. They form one of the many gas-works which render London the best lighted city in the world; one of those dingy factories, those dark sources of brilliancy, which send silently down street, court, lane, and alley, a constant stream of light, to brighten alike thronged thoroughfare, rich warehouse, and busy workshop. That gashouse stands in the ancient sanctuary of Whitefriars, the Alsatia of James the First's day, peopled by Sir Walter Scott with the dramatis persona of his "Fortunes of Nigel." There his hero, like other fugitives from the talons of the law, obtained protection upon taking the oath,—

"By spigot and barrel,

By bilbo and buff,

Thou art sworn to the quarrel

Of the blades of the huff.

For Whitefriars and its claims

To be champion or martyr;

And to fight for its dames
Like a Knight of the Garter."

ST. PAUL'S THE CITY CHURCHES.

Slash-bucklers and bullies have now given way to coalheavers, gasmen, and glassblowers (for there is in Whitefriars a large glass-house; a curious and interesting manufacture, which well repays a visit of inspection); while gracefully over the neighbouring houses tapers one of the tallest and finest spires reared by Sir Christopher Wren,-the spire of St. Bride's, in Fleet Street.

But we are under the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge-now the second in seniority of the London bridges; and thrown open by the mob, who, during Lord George Gordon's riots, burnt down, Rebecca like, the toll-houses, never again to be erected. Clearing this, St. Paul's becomes the most noticeable object, seated in dignified splendour upon higher ground than the wharfs and warehouses which line the bank, and shut out from us the view of the lower part of the building. The huge dome of the metropolitan cathedral is crowded round about by the spires, towers, and pinnacles of thirty other churches, many of them the products of the same genius that reared the English rival to St. Peter's at Rome. Varying in height, in style, and size, most of them agree in one particular, the time of their erection. The Great Fire hereabout raged with fiercest fury, the old churches falling in company with the wooden dwellings that encompassed them. When the scourge had passed away, each parish reared again its "place of prayer and praise," as far as might be, upon the foundations of its predecessor; and round about the spot where a thousand busy trowels built up St. Paul's, knots of workmen were striving at a similar task, and raising once again the parish churches of the city. Each of these thirty spires and towers now before us has its history; each has linked with it some fact or incident-told, it may be, on a tombstone; it may be, in a parish register to call up thoughts and feelings which invest the meanest of them with interesting associations. Some claim connection with a poet's name, some with a soldier's; some entomb a faithful cavalier, who followed the fortunes of an unhappy king; some still carry in remembrance the good deeds of a rich citizen, who, winning wealth by careful thrift and untiring industry, endowed a hospital or founded an almshouse; some boast the pulpit, whence were, and are, given forth the doctrines of pious and learned divines; some possess master

MILTON-RICHARD II.

pieces of the painter's art; some, as St. Stephen's, Walbrook, are unrivalled for the originality and elegance of their internal architectural proportions; others, as St. Mary-le-Bow, boast the beauty of a lofty spire, or, in gayer spirit, ask admiration for the tones of a peal of bells. One has a fearful interest from its shadowing the place of public execution, from its bell summoning the condemned from the cell to the scaffold; another is connected with curious customs of almsgiving, after the fashion of a by-gone time; St. Michael, Queenhithe, links its name to that of Whittington, the honoured theme of youthful story; while, above all in size and dignity, towers St. Paul's, rich in architectural beauty, a lasting testimony to the skill of its builder, Sir Christopher Wren, and fit shrine for the memories of the learned, the wise, and the brave, whose monuments are placed within its walls.

The tower of Allhallows points out Bread Street, where Milton was born, and where now a tablet to his memory is fixed in the outer wall of the church. In letters of gold, the name, JOHN MILTON, catches the restless eye of the passing moneymaker, as he hurries along the narrow pavement of Watling Street, diverting (and, if but for one moment, well diverting) his thoughts from lucre, and chafferings, and dark, close-packed warehouses, to poetry and poets, and the higher destinies of humanity. Nor worse will we think of him if he, with English pride, goes muttering on his way the lines now cut into the corner stone:"Three poets in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England, did adorn; The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, The next in majesty-in both the last: The force of Nature could no further go,

To form the last she joined the other two.'

That church, whose brick tower you may see surmounted by a steeple, the lower story of which is formed by eight projecting Ionic columns, bearing an entablature and vases, is St. Michael's, Paternoster Royal. Its regal designation arose from its near neighbourhood to a large building of great strength, in which the kings of England lived to the time of Stephen. here, says Froissart in his "Chronicles," that Richard the Second met his lady mother, after the death of Wat Tyler, as he rode down from Smithfield with Sir William Walworth, who

It was