Five thousand three hundred and forty-four enactments have been added to the Statute Book since the Queen came to the throne, and the figures throw a flood of light upon the ‘progress’ of the Victorian era. In order to realise where we were in 1837 we have only to obliterate this enormous mass of legislation. In the realm of law there seems then to be little left. All our procedure--equitable, legal, and criminal--much of the substance of equity, law, and justice, as we understand the words, is gone. ‘Law’ had a different meaning fifty years ago; ‘equity’ hardly had any meaning at all; ‘justice’ had an ugly sound. The ‘local habitation’ of the Courts, it is true, was then much the same as it remained for the next forty-five years. The network of gloomy little rooms, connected with narrow winding passages, which Sir John Soane built in 1820–1825, on the west side of Westminster Hall, on the site of the old Exchequer Chamber, with an exterior in imitation of Palladio’s basilica at Vicenza, but outrageously out of keeping with the glorious vestibule of William Rufus, was then the home of law. The Court of Chancery met in a gloomy little apartment near the southern end of the hall. Here the Lord Chancellor sat in term time--there were then four terms of three weeks each--with the mace and crimson silk bag, embroidered with gold, in which was deposited the silver pair of dies of the Great Seal, and a large nosegay of flowers before him. It was, in those days, only in the vacations that the Chancellor sat at Lincoln’s Inn. The Master of the Rolls and the Vice-Chancellor of England also sat at Westminster during the sittings, while in the intervals the former presided over the Rolls Court in Rolls Yard and the latter over the Court which had been built for him on the west side of Lincoln’s Inn Hall. The three Common Law Courts, moreover, during term time, sat twelve days at Westminster and twelve days at the Guildhall, while the Assizes were chiefly held during the vacations. [Illustration: A POINT OF LAW.]