into a perfect multiplication table of shapes,
and make as excellent a "back" at leap frog
as any young gentleman from the ages of eight
to twelve, inclusive, could desire. The Lord
in Downing Street vomits statistics by the
column; the Lord in Belgrave Square is an
indifferent hand at counting at whist, and
never could understand a betting-book. The
Lord in private life is a nobleman of
unimpeachable veracity, of unquestioned candour
and sincerity, and enjoys the possession of an
excellent memory; the Lord in St. Stephen's
confidently affirms black to be white, shuffles,
prevaricates, and backs out of obligations in
an unseemly manner, and has a convenient
forgetfulness of what he has said or done, and
what he ought and has promised, to say or do,
which is really surprising.

Habit gives a double cuticle to Mr. John
Trett (of the firm of Tare and Trett) of the
city of London, ship-broker. One Mr. Trett
is a morose despot, with a fierce whisker, a
malevolent white neckcloth, and an evil eye.
He is the terror of his clerks, the bane of
ship captains, the bugbear of the Jerusalem
coffee-house. His surly talk is of ships that
ought not to have come home in ballast, and
underwriters on whom he will be "down;"
of confounded owners, of freights not worth
twopence, of ships gone to the dogs, and
customers not worth working for. He is a
hard man, and those who serve him, he says,
do not earn their salt. He is a temperate
man, and refuses chop-and-sherry invitations
with scorn. He is a shabbily dressed
man, and groans at the hardness of the
times; yet he has a double at Dalston
worth fifty thousand pounds, the merriest,
most jovial, chirruping, middle-aged gentleman,
with the handsomest house, the most
attached servants, the largest assortment of
comic albums and scrap books, and the
prettiest daughters that eyes could wish to
behold. He is something more than an
amateur on the violoncello, although Giuseppe
Pizzicato, from Genoa, was last week brought
to Guildhall, at the complaint of Mr. Trett's
double, charged with outraging the tranquillity
of Copperbottom Court, Threadneedle
Street, where the ship-brokers have their
offices, by the performance of airs from Don
Giovanni on the hurdy-gurdy. East of
Temple Bar he abhors the juice of the grape;
at Dalston he has an undeniable taste for old
Port, and is irresistible in the proposition of
"another bottle." It is quite a sight, when
he insists on fetching this same "other bottle"
from some peculiar and only-to-himself known
bin, to see him emerging from the cellar
beaming with smiles, cobwebs, and old Port
wine. He is an excellent father, a liberal
master, a jewel of a man at Dalston: only
beware of him in Copperbottom Court.
Temple Bar is the scarifier that performs the
Laurentian operation upon him, and trust me,
the city skin is a rough one.

When you walk into Lincoln's Inn old
square, and up the rotten staircase (worn
with hopeless clients' footsteps) of No. 202;
when you read on a scowling door an inscription
purporting it to be the entrance to
Messrs. Harrow and Wrench's offices; when,
opening that door, which creaks on its hinges
as though clients were being squeezed behind
it, you push open the inner door of baize,
which yields with a softness equal to the
velvet of a cat's paw; when you have waited
a sufficient time in the outer office, and
shuddered at the white-faced runners, and the
ghastly Law Almanack, like Charles the
First's death warrant in a black frame, and
listened to the infernal music of the busy-writing
clerks, scoring the doom of clients on
parchment cut from clients' skins, with pens
plucked from clients' feathers, with ink
distilled from clients' blood, tempered with
the gall of law (as all these matters appear
to you); when you are at last admitted to
the inner sanctum, and to an interview
with Mr. Harrow; when, as a debtor, you
have begged for time, for lenity, for mercy,
and have been refused; or, as a creditor,
listened to Mr. Harrow's bland promises to
sell Brown up, to seize Jones's sticks, to
take care that Smith does not pass his
last examination, to serve Tompkins with a
ne exeat, and to take out process of outlawry
against Robinson; when you have paid a bill
of costs, or have been presented with one which
you have not the remotest chance of paying;
when you have sustained all the misery and
madness of the law's delay, and all the insolence
of the office, you will very probably descend
the staircase, commending the whole temple
of injustice, cruelty, and chicane, to the infernal
gods. Mr. Harrow will seem to you
an embodied ghoule; Mr. Wrench, a vampire,
with an arsenal of legal sticks and staves
through what ought to be his heart, but is
a rule to show cause; the scribbling clerks,
the white-faced runners, the greasy
process-servers, the villainous baillif's followers
snuffing up the scent of a debtor to be trapped
from the instructions of a clerk—all these
will appear to you cannibals, blood-suckers,
venomous reptiles, hating their fellow-creatures,
and a-hungered for their entrails.
Yet, all these useful members of society are
dualities; they have all their doubles. Mr.
Harrow leaves his inexorable severity, his
savage appetite for prey on his faded green-baize
table. In Guildford Street, Russell
Square, he gives delightful evening parties,
loses his money at cards with charming
complacency, and is never proof against
petitions for new bonnets from his daughters,
for autumn excursions from his wife, for ten-pound
notes from his son at Cambridge.
Mr. Wrench (who more particularly looks
after the selling-up and scarifying business)
is an active member of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and
is quite a Providence to the poor crossing-sweepers
in the neighbourhood of his