which the angels are supposed to weep. It
was a goodly thing to me to watch the lifting
by some subtle champion of the burden of a
crime from the sore back of the accused, and
to see it shifted—under the name, perhaps, of
"merely an hypothesis"—upon the whole
shoulders of the accuser, or of some important
witness. Of consequences I thought nothing,
and my sense of right and wrong was rather
blunted in that place by the prevailing humour
into which I fell—more prevalent in those
days than in these. The argument concerned
me. Not the prisoner, and not my country
represented by the judge. The only thing
that interested me upon the bench, was the
great Sword of Justice hung in state over the
central chair. It used to occur to me that
I should like to see it bare. I used to
wonder whether the bright blade suffered
neglect, and whether it might not lie covered
with a great deal of rust within its decorated
sheath. Some little misgiving upon that
head lingers with me still.

So I spent pleasant hours at the Old Bailey,
taking a child's view of the place; and, after
years of absence, I have lately been revisiting
my Yarrow. I have again wandered more
than once among the victims and the witnesses
of wrongs that have been done by man
against his fellow, and among the stalls of
apples, gingerbread, and Barcelona nuts
erected for their consolation in the vestibule
of Justice. Again I have sat in the presence
of the sword, and seen misdoers brought to
answer for their crimes to an offended nation.
The Yarrow is the same; my eyes are
different. Even "Memory's shadowy
moonshine"—though there are few things that
look ill by moonshine—can do nothing to
soften down the ugliness of crime, or wash
the dusky face of the Old Bailey with celestial
Kalydor.

Let me set down in sober seriousness some
of the observations I have lately made. Let
it be understood that I am not about to
abuse, condemn or ridicule, any high court of
justice, to take by the hand any convict from
the dock, by special choice and liking, as a
man and brother, to illustrate by facts any
foregone conclusion, or to moralise on any
heap of skeletons (dry figures, which are
skeletons of truth) dug out of the graves in
which they have been decently interred by
Parliamentary reporters. I shall simply tell
what I have seen and thought of late, under
the roof which is spread out above the awful
sword.

How would it be alone at midnight with
that Sword? No starlight could pierce
through the windows stained by the old
glass painter, Time, to sink into the solemn
darkness of the room. One might dream of
it that the sword was there shedding a dim
radiance that displayed clearly its own
outline—dimly all things else—the empty seats
of the judges, the vacant benches of the
counsel, and far away in the remote darkness
of the Court, the solemn dock. At that
dock, in the last twilight a murderer stood,
watching the man who rose from a group
seated on those benches to his left, and reading
the unspoken word out of his face. The
breath of the guilty man, and the breaths of
the witnesses who told, and of the
counsellors who urged the facts for and against
him; of the judge who summed them up,
and of the jury who considered them; of the
people, and of the reporters for the people
who will to-morrow make a proclamation to
the world of all the secrets of the murderer,
are mingled in a steam upon the walls. The
air is close and has a taste of death in it.

Then the fresh dawn that is far away beyond
rivers and valleys, capping with light the
mountain-tops, and covering their sides with
summer mist, makes every minute more
defined the outline of St. Paul's, and the
fresh light of the summer morning, filtered
through the everlasting clouds upon the
glass, makes day again within the walls of
the Old Bailey. There enter women less
fresh than Aurora; there enter dingy unshaven
men, who beat, and sweep, and open
ways by which the air that has blown softly
over Smithfield, Newgate Market, and the
great dome of Saint Paul's, can enter also.
They depart, and in due time the barristers
may come in one by one, the crier may come
to the performance of his day's work, and a
suckling woman, and a seedy man or two,
may take their places as spectators in the
gallery. The jury are assembling, and the
judges soon will take their seats for the
performance of a pretty hard day's work. But
nobody is thinking of the sword.

When I returned for the first time to the
scene of my past recreations it was afternoon.
I found a throng of people in the court and
vestibule. There wait the witnesses till they
are called, there, or about the doors, and in
the recesses of the public-houses opposite.
There are two ways into the Old Bailey.
One is by a great front door opening from
the street into a spacious vestibule like a box
entrance; the other is by a door at the side,
as one might say, a pit entrance, from a
paved court attached to the building. Both
doors lead, however, into the same great hall
with snaky staircases coiled up its dingy and
unwholesome walls and open jaws of galleries,
through which they who are privileged can
pass into the inner darkness of the place.

Any whim for regarding the Old Bailey as
a theatre might have been fairly supported
by the bills of the day's performances posted
here and there, for the information of
witnesses, on the walls of the vestibule or
against pillars in the court. These bills
represented what cases would be heard in
each court, and the order in which they
would probably be called for hearing.
Witnesses therefore could guess in a rough way
the time for their exits and their entrances.
For trial in the New Court I saw that