And so it goes. The knight may become a baronet, the baronet a baron, the baron a duke--this last not often now, only for very great service rendered the Empire; and with each advance in rank comes increases of responsibility--in theory, at least. Have our political theories worked out so well that we are justified in making fun of theirs as we sometimes do? I think not. After our country has stood as well as England has the shocks which seven or ten centuries may bring it, we may have the right to say, "We order these things better at home."
While musing thus, the Strand and Temple Bar of a century and a half ago rise up before me, and I notice coming along the footway a tall, burly old man, walking with a rolling gait, dressed in a brown coat with metal buttons, knee-breeches, and worsted stockings, with large silver buckles on his clumsy shoes. He seems like a wise old fellow, so I approach him and tell him who I am and of my perplexities.
"What! Sir, an American? They are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." And then, seeing me somewhat disconcerted, he adds less ferociously: "I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another." Saying which, he turns into a court off Fleet Street and is lost to view.
It was only after he had disappeared that I realized that I had been speaking to Dr. Johnson.
Just when the original posts, bars, and chains gave way to a building known as Temple Bar, we have no means of knowing. Honest John Stow, whose effigy in terra cotta still looks down on us from the wall of the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft, published his famous "Survay of [Elizabethan] London" in 1598. In it he makes scant mention of Temple Bar; and this is the more remarkable because he describes so accurately many of the important buildings, and gives the exact location of every court and lane, every pump and well, in the London of his day.
Stow assures his readers that his accuracy cost him many a weary mile's travel and many a hard-earned penny, and his authority has never been disputed. He refers to the place several times, but not to the gate itself. "Why this is, I have not heard, nor can I conjecture," to use a phrase of his; but we know that a building known as Temple Bar must have been standing when the "Survay" appeared; for it is clearly indicated in Aggas's pictorial map of London, published a generation earlier; otherwise we might infer that in Stow's time it was merely what he terms it, a "barre" separating the liberties of London from Westminster--the city from the shire. It is obvious that it gets its name from that large group of buildings known as the Temple, which lies between Fleet Street and the river, long the quarters of the Knights Templar, and for centuries past the centre of legal learning in England.