Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/392

316 316 POSTHUMOUS PAPERSI OV

CHAPTER XXX.

WHICH IS ALL ABOUT THE LAW, AND SUNDRY GRBAT AUTHORITIES LEARNED THEREIN.

Scattered about, in various holes and corners of the Temple, are certain dark and dirty chambers, in and out of which, all the morning" in Vacation, and half the evening too in Term time, there may be seen constantly hurrying with bundles of papers under their arms, and pro- truding from their pockets, an almost uninterrupted succession of Lawyers' Clerks. There are several grades of Lawyers' Clerks. There is the Articled Clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in perspective, who runs a tailor's bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower Street and another in Tavistock Square, goes out of town every Long Vacation to see his father, who keeps live horses innumerable ; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks. There is the salaried clerk — out of door, or in door, as the case may be — who devotes the major part of his thirty shillings a week to his personal pleasure and adornment, repairs half-price to the Adelphi at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the cider cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion, which expired six months ago. There is the middle-aged copying clerk, with a large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there are the oifice lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night, for saveloys and porter, and think there's nothing like " life." There are varieties of the genus too numerous to recapitulate, but however numerous they may be, they are all to be seen, at certain regulated business hours, hurrying to and from the places we have just mentioned.

These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession, where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and numer- ous other ingenious little machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolu- ment of the practitioners of the law. They are, for the most part, low- roofed, mouldy rooms, where innumerable rolls of parchment, which have been perspiring in secret for the last century, send forth an agreeable odour, which is mingled by day with the scent of the dry rot, and by night with the various exhalations which arise from damp cloaks, fester- ing umbrellas, and the coarsest tallow candles.

About half-past seven o'clock in the evening, some ten days or ft^a fortnight after Mr. Pickwick and his friends returned to London, ther^^^ hurried into one of these ofl&ces, an individual in a brown coat and brass buttons, whose long hair was scrupulously twisted round the rim of his napless hat, and whose soiled drab trousers were so tightly strapped over his Blucher boots, that his knees threatened every moment to start from their concealment. He produced from his coat pockets a long and nar- row strip of parchment, on which the presiding functionary impressed an,