TEMPLE CHURCH MONUMENTS By Mrs. A. Esdaile Squeezing blood out
of a stone would seem to be an easy task compared with extracting matter to fill two hundred large pages from the tombs and memorials of the Temple Church. But only the most minute attention to detail could satisfy the high standard of scholarship which Mrs. Esdaile has set herself in the production of Temple Church Monuments (George Barber, 21s.), and in reality the book could not be shorter without being also less useful. The principal object which Mrs. Esdaile has had in view is to give an exact account of all the monuments which still exist in the Temple Church, together with their inscriptions and notes on the artists who produced them, and further to set out all the available in- formation about those monuments which have vanished. This has meant the collection of a great mass of material from manuscript records and printed descriptions, all of which tiresome work seems to have been done with unfailing accu- racy. But it has also meant discoveries of a quite different kind, and one of the most curious parts of Mrs. Esdaile's book describes how with various members of her family she was led to discover several of the monuments, supposedly lost, lying in fragments in one of the more obscure parts of the tri- forium. These have been reconstructed and are reproduced by photographs and drawings in the book. But Mrs. Esdaile does not only deal with matters of scholarship : she has also a sad tale of human degradation to tell when she goes through the story of all the misfortunes which the monuments have undergone. The wanton destruction of fine seventeenth- century work in restorations of 1827 and 1842 is horrid if not unexpected, but we are really surprised to read of the mal- treatment which restorers who were fanatically Gothic meted out to mediaeval works. As Mrs. Esdaile points out, the much maligned Wyntt, at least made a fine effect with the tombs which he disturbed. His successors often hid them away in ill-made holes, thereby bringing credit neither On themselves nor on the monuments.
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