seem to have been preserved in these busy
clays as needful harbours against the roar
and storm of the main streets. Perhaps it is
a hot and garish noon; but here there is
shadow and coolness; and the little sunlight
that finds its way over the tops of the
houses, only suffices to make a dancing and
fantastic pattern on the pavement. Everything
looks as it might have looked in the
long-vanished days. Here are the brick
walls that our forefathers built; here are
the red-tiled and mountainous roofs they slept
under, the stone steps they trod, and the
windows they looked through, that shut out
the wind and rain in the days of Pope or
Dryden. Here, also left behind, you may
sometimes see the goblet-shaped street-lamps
of the last century, fastened high up to the
house-sides by bars of iron, or suspended
between wall and wall; the same lamps which, in
the sleepy times of oil, may have seen the
link-boy counting over his gains; the foot-pad
sneaking in the shade of the dead wall; the
gentleman of the road, in his gold lace and
ruffles; the swaggering mohawk, flushed and
reeling from the late tavern; the watchman,
dozing as he cries the hour; the ruffler, and
the beggar, and the rake. Gas now glares
within the same glass shade where oil
formerly winked; but scarcely anything else
has changed in these shadowy recesses.

On the north side of Fleet Street, and to
the south of Cheapside—in the neighbourhood
of Doctors' Commons, and in connection
with the Inns of Court, as well as in
many other parts of the metropolis—we come
frequently upon these nooks and quiet angles.
Some of them are poor and dirty enough;
but for the most part they have a grave,
learned, legal look; being, in fact, the
studious retreats of lawyers. They are
always very agreeable spots for meditation:
the poet Gay, writing in the year seventeen
hundred and twelve, is eloquent in their
praise:

"But sometimes let me leave the noisy roads,
And, silent, wander in the close abodes,
Where wheels ne'er shake the ground; there, pensive
stray,
In studious thought, the long uncrowded way."

At another part of the same poem, he
warns the reader against entering such
haunts at night; and not without reason, for,
in Gay's time the main streets were the
only places where a man had even a moderate
chance of not getting his skull cracked, or his
pockets lightened.

Poets have talked much of the inspirations
of the fields, woods, and mountains; and
doubtless they have ennobling influences; but
lofty dreams may be dreamt within sound of
the disjointed and ghostly chimes of St.
Clement's Church—those bells which are
popularly supposed to be perpetually announcing
oranges and lemons, but which always seem
to me to be trying to learn the Old Hundred
and Fourth Psalm, and invariably breaking
down in the attempt.* Noble schemes of
life have doubtless been shaped in Stationers'
Hall Court and Paternoster Row; and
great poems meditated in Monmouth Street
and the other solitudes of Seven Dials.
Were it not for the hideous neighbourhood
by which it is in-islanded, I can conceive no
town residence more delightful than Clements'
Inn; that inn to which Master Justice
Shallow belonged, and where he spent so
merry a time. Old red-tiled houses, yet not
too old for solidity and comfort; whispering
trees, standing on green grass-plats;
picturesque gateways, ready to admit the visits
of your friends, yet shutting out the noisy
world, and giving you a sense of seclusion;
gravel walks, for pacing up and down,
while you listen to the exterior hum of life
coming towards you from the Strand; these
are the elements which make Clement's Inn
to my mind a spot to be coveted. Then, for
mysterious intertanglement of paths, and for
a sense of close seclusion, defended towards
the main approach by massive gates, what
can be more admirable than the Temple?
No enchanted forest in Ariosto or Spenser
could be more secret or labyrinthine; and
the bright lawn of the gardens, looking out
upon the moving pageants of the river, with
the meditative trees and the cawing rooks
that seem for ever dreaming of past times,
and the surrounding houses, substantial and
grave, yet cheerful, make up, to my thinking,
a quiet nest, more delightful for being in
the heart of London's vitality. Grays Inn
is stately and majestic; but it wants the
grace and brightness, the ever-renewing
poetry of trees; its garden being out of sight
as one stands in either of the squares.
Lincoln's Inn, in the gardens of which Mr.
Bickersteth used to walk by favour of the
benchers, is a beautiful retirement, rendered
magnificent by the noble pile of stone buildings,
and picturesque by the rich Elizabethan
architecture of the New Hall; and Inigo
Jones's chapel, raised aloft upon arches, with
the open crypt, upon a level with the street,
wherein the benchers are interred, is as good
as a bit out of the Mysteries of Udolpho.

* Touching these same chimes, Leigh Hunt, writing
twenty years ago, says that they had been then
deranged for twenty years. He observes—''The
chimes may still be heard at midnight, as Falstaff
describes having heard them with Justice Shallow.
If they did not execute one of Handel's psalm-tunes,
we should take them to he the very same he speaks
of, and conclude that they had grown hoarse with age
and sitting up; for, to our knowledge, they have lost
some of their notes these twenty years and the rest
are falling away."

Any street, court, square, thoroughfare,
or no thoroughfare, which is old, is interesting
and pleasant. Not that I am at all disposed
to give into that cant which regards
anything that has been left behind as necessarily
better than everything that is of the present;