voyage to see. The walls and windows are decorated with the arms of
various members of the Inn, and the paintings are numerous and of great
historical interest. Over the dais is a portrait of Charles I. on
horse-back, by Vandyke, one of the three original paintings of the unhappy
monarch by that great master. Another of the trio is at Windsor, while the
third adorns Warwick Castle. There are also copies of portraits of Charles
II., James II., William III., Queen Anne, and George II., and marble busts,
by Behnes, of "Doubting" Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty
judge. The screen and the music-gallery are marvels of the wood-carver's
art. Tradition says the screen was made of oak from the timbers of the
wrecked Invincible Armada; but this cannot be, inasmuch as it was set up a
dozen years before the doomed squadron sailed out of Lisbon harbor.

The Middle Temple Library, a handsome building of recent erection,
situated on the river side of the Inn, at the southwest corner of the
Temple Gardens, was opened by the Prince of Wales, October 31, 1861. While
it is of nobler proportions than the library of the Inner Temple, it does
not seem to be so well suited for the purposes of the student. Its
location, however, is far more pleasant, on the margin of the
flower-mantled garden, and within sight of the busy Victoria Embankment
and of the panoramic river scenery. From the great oriel window a noble
vista is unrolled. In the distance, the twin-towered Houses of Parliament
are outlined against the sky, while the massive proportions of the "water
front" of Somerset House, the motley groupings of the structures that
crowd the intervening water-side, and the flashing river hound by
many-arched bridges, fill the middle distance.

Aside from the lustre shed around its history by many eminent lawyers and
jurists, the Middle Temple has numbered among its students several great
poets and dramatists, notably John Ford, William Congreve, Nicholas Rowe,