The sittings of the Central Criminal Court, which was founded in 1834, were held, as they are still held, in the Sessions House in the Old Bailey. Rebuilt in 1809 on the site of the old Sessions House which was destroyed in the No-Popery riots of 1780, and of the old Surgeons’ Hall--where the bodies of the malefactors executed in Newgate were dissected--the building, although sufficiently commodious for holding the sessions of London and Middlesex, for which it was originally intended, as the centre of the criminal jurisdiction of the kingdom, was never anything but a makeshift. Since, however, its dingy Courts have remained the same down to our own times, we can the better realise the surroundings of the criminal trials of those days. It was here that Greenacre was tried in 1837. Bow Street was then in the zenith of its fame, and was practically the centre of the police arrangements of London. [Illustration: MARSHALSEA--THE COURTYARD] Those were the palmy days of the Court of Chancery. Reform was, as it had been for centuries, in the air, and there, notwithstanding the efforts of Lord Lyndhurst, it seemed likely to remain. Practically nothing had been done to carry into effect the recommendations of the Commission of 1826. At the time of her Majesty’s accession there were nearly a thousand causes waiting to be heard by the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, and the Vice-Chancellor of England. It was verily a ‘dead sea of stagnant litigation.’ ‘The load of business now before the Court,’ remarked Sir Lancelot Shadwell, ‘is so great that three angels could not get through it.’ Think what this meant! Many of these suits had endured for a quarter of a century, some for half a century; ‘the lawyers,’ to use the current, if incorrect, phrase of the time, ‘tossing the balls to each other.’ One septuagenarian suitor, goaded to madness by the ‘law’s delay,’ had, a few years before, thrust his way into the presence of Lord Eldon, and begged for a decision in a cause waiting for judgment which had been before the Court ever since the Lord Chancellor, then nearly eighty, was a schoolboy. Everyone remembers ‘Miss Flite,’ who expected a judgment--‘on the Day of Judgment,’ and Gridley ‘the man from Shropshire:’ both are true types of the Chancery suitors of fifty, thirty, twenty years ago. It would be wearisome indeed to detail the stages through which a Chancery suit dragged its slow length along. The ‘eternal’ bills, with which it began--and ended--cross bills, answers, interrogatories, replies, rejoinders, injunctions, decrees, references to masters, masters’ reports, exceptions to masters’ reports, were veritably ‘a mountain of costly nonsense.’ And when we remember that the intervals between the various stages were often measured by years--that every death made a bill of review, or, worse still, a supplemental suit, necessary--we can realise the magnitude of the evil. The mere comparison of the