One more memory of Fleet Street before we leave it, in connection with Dick's Coffee-house, which used to stand at Nos. 7 and 8. In December, 1763, the poet Cowper, then a student in the Inner Temple, was appointed Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords. Delicate, shy, intensely sensitive, and with a strong predisposition to insanity, the dread of these onerous public duties disturbed the balance of his morbid brain. His madness broke out one morning at Dick's, as he himself afterwards narrated. He said:
"At breakfast I read the newspaper, and in it a letter, which the further I perused it the more closely engaged my attention. I cannot now recollect the purport of it; but before I had finished it, it appeared demonstratively true to me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author appeared to be acquainted with my purpose of self-destruction, and to have written that letter on purpose to secure and hasten the execution of it. My mind probably at this time began to be disordered; however it was, I was certainly given to a strong delusion. I said within myself, 'Your cruelty shall be gratified, you shall have your revenge,' and flinging down the paper in a fit of strong passion, I rushed hastily out of the room, directing my way towards the fields, where I intended to find some lane to die in, or if not, determined to poison myself in a ditch, when I could meet with one sufficiently retired."
This paroxysm ended in Cowper trying to hang himself, but, the rope breaking, he went down to the Thames to the Custom House Quay and threatened to drown himself. This attempt, however, also failed, and friends interfering, he was removed to an asylum, where he remained eighteen months.
From Fleet Street it is but a step to the Temple, with its grey quiet corners full of echoing memories, stretching back even to the days of Shakespeare, whose _Twelfth Night_ was performed before an audience of his contemporaries in the self-same Middle Temple Hall that still confronts us. The names of Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, John Gower, Thomas Shadwell, William Wycherley, Nicholas Rowe, Francis Beaumont, William Congreve, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Day, Tom Moore, Sheridan, George Colman, jun., Marston, and Ford, are all upon the Temple rolls and each must in his day have been a familiar figure among the ancient buildings. But Charles Lamb is the presiding genius of the place.