man; but he did it just in time.

Before I introduce you to the types of the judge, the counsel, the solicitors, let me say something to you of the district in which lawyers live, or rather in Dickens’s time lived, and still do congregate.  From Gray’s Inn in the north to the Temple in the south, from New Inn and Clement’s Inn in the west to Barnard’s Inn in the east. 

I once lived myself in Clement’s Inn, and heard the chimes go, too; and I remember one day I sat in my little room very near the sky (I do not know why it is that poverty always gets as near the sky as possible; but I should think it is because the general idea is that there is more sympathy in heaven than elsewhere), and as I sat there a knock came at the door, and the head of the porter of Clement’s Inn presented itself to me.  It was the first of January, and he gravely gave me an orange and a lemon.  He had a basketful on his arm.  I asked for some explanation.  The only information forthcoming was that from time immemorial every tenant on New Year’s Day was presented with an orange and a lemon, and that I was expected, and that every tenant was expected, to

give half-a-crown to the porter.  Further inquiries from the steward gave me this explanation, that in old days when the river was not used merely as a sewer, the fruit was brought up in barges and boats to the steps from below the bridge and carried by porters through the Inn to Clare Market.  Toll was at first charged, and this toll was divided among the tenants whose convenience was interfered with; hence the old lines beginning “Oranges and lemons said the bells of St. Clement’s.”  I have often wondered whether the rest of the old catch had reason as well as rhyme.

Dickens loved the old Inns and squares.  Traddles lived in Gray’s Inn: Traddles who was in love with “the dearest girl in the world”; Tom Pinch and his sister used to

meet near the fountain in the Middle Temple; Sir John Chester had rooms in Paper Buildings; Pip lived in Garden Court at the time of the collapse of Great Expectations; Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn had their queer domestic partnership in the Temple.  The scene of the murderous plot in “Hunted Down” is also laid in the Temple, “at the top of a lonely corner house overlooking the river,” probably the end house of King’s Bench Walk.  Mr. Grewgious, Herbert Pocket, and Joe Gargery are associated with Staple Inn and Barnard’s Inn.

Lincoln’s Inn has not been forgotten; for though Mr. Tulkinghorn lived in the Fields, yet Serjeant Snubbin was to be found in Lincoln’s Inn Old Square.

I never could understand why

Dickens located the Serjeant in the realms of Equity; but what should interest us more to-night is the fact that the greater part of “Pickwick” was written in Furnival’s Inn, which, as Dickens describes it, was “a shady, quiet place echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on summer evenings.”

But to know the Inns as Dickens knew them, let us accompany Mr. Pickwick to the Magpie and Stump in search of Mr. Lowten, Mr. Perker’s clerk.

“Is Mr. Lowten here, ma’am?” inquired Mr. Pickwick.

“Yes, he is, sir,” replied the landlady.  “Here, Charley, show the gentleman in to Mr. Lowten.”

“The gen’lm’n can’t go in just now,” said a shambling pot-boy, with a red head,

“’cos Mr. Lowten’s singin’ a comic song, and he’ll put him out.  He’ll be done d’rectly, sir.”

Well, you know, respectable solicitors (clerks) don’t sing comic songs at public houses nowadays, but that is how Mr. Pickwick found Mr. Lowten.

“Would you like to join us?” said Mr. Lowten, when at length he had finished his comic song and been introduced to Mr. Pickwick.  And I am very glad that Mr. Pickwick did join them, as he heard something of the old Inns from old Jack Bamber.

“I have been to-night, gentlemen,” said Mr. Pickwick, hoping to start a subject which all the company could take a part in discussing—“I have been to-night in a place which you all know very well, doubtless, but which I have not been in for some years, and know very little of; I mean

Gray’s Inn, gentlemen.  Curious little nooks in a great place, like London, these old Inns are.”

“By Jove!” said the chairman, whispering across the table to Mr. Pickwick, “you have hit upon something that one of us, at least, would talk upon for ever.  You’ll draw old Jack Bamber out; he was never heard to talk about anything else but the Inns, and he has lived alone in them till he’s half crazy.”

“Aha!” said the old man, a brief description of whose manner and appearance concluded the last chapter, “aha! who was talking about the Inns?”

“I was, sir,” replied Mr. Pickwick; “I was observing what singular old places they are.”

“You!” said the old man, contemptuously.  “What do you know of the time when young men shut themselves up in those lonely rooms, and read and read, hour after hour, and night after night, till

their reason wandered beneath their midnight studies; till their mental powers were exhausted: till morning’s light brought no freshness or health to them; and they sank beneath the unnatural devotion of their youthful energies to their dry old books?  Coming down to a later time, and a very different day, what do you know of the gradual sinking beneath consumption, or the quick wasting of fever—the grand results of ‘life’ and dissipation—which men have undergone in these same rooms?  How many vain pleaders for mercy, do you think, have turned away heart-sick from the lawyer’s office, to find a resting-place in the Thames, or a refuge in the gaol?  They are no ordinary houses, those.  There is not a panel in the old wainscoting but what, if it were endowed with the powers of speech and memory, could start from the wall and tell its tale of horror—the romance of life, sir, the romance of life!  Commonplace as they may seem now, I tell you

they are strange old places, and I would rather hear many a legend with a terrific-sounding name than the true history of one old set of chambers.”

There was something so odd in the old man’s sudden energy, and the subject which had called it forth, that Mr. Pickwick was prepared with no observation in reply; and the old man checking his impetuosity, and resuming the leer, which had disappeared during his previous excitement, said,—

“Look at them in another light; their most common-place and least romantic.  What fine places of slow torture they are!  Think of the needy man who has spent his all, beggared himself and pinched his friends to enter the profession, which will never yield him a morsel of bread.  The waiting—the hope—the disappointment—the fear—the misery—the poverty—the blight on his hopes and end to his career—the suicide, perhaps, or the shabby, slipshod drunkard.  Am I not right about

them?”  And the old man rubbed his hands, and leered as if in delight at having found another point of view in which to place his favourite