Perhaps Clifford's Inn may yet maintain some transmitted gloom from the fact that here used to live the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court, "which rendered," says a chronicler, "this little spot the fountain-head of more misery than any whole county in England." A grimy archway, piercing the buildings of Clifford's Inn, and adorned (?) by a ramshackle hanging lamp, leads through another tiny courtyard to the adjoining Fleet Street. In such crowded city byways, "businesses," and things, and people, are often in the strangest juxtaposition. It seems as if every possible trade and profession had made up its mind to live, in deadly rivalry, within the same few cubic feet of mother earth. Here, for instance, a smart kitchen, well-appointed, with shining pots and pans, looks straight into the windows of a dirty law-stationer's; there, a printing-press rumbles, cheek-by-jowl with a Fleet Street tea-shop; here a theatre stage-door ogles, at a convenient distance, the inviting back entrance of a pawnshop (both of them discreetly placed in a retiring side-alley); and there, the much populated "model" looks across, somewhat yearningly, to some cat-ridden and rusty desolation, that has got, somehow or other, "into Chancery," or some such equivalent for oblivion and decay. And, between the Fleet Street entrance to Clifford's Inn and Chancery Lane, rises, in strangest medley of all, the blackened height of St. Dunstan's in-the-West, a rebuilding of 1831, by J. Shaw, on an ancient site. Its tall tower is effective, but the body of the church has a somewhat abbreviated air, being tightly sandwiched in between the new buildings of "Law Life Assurance" on one side, and the _Dundee Advertiser_, &c., on the other. The two famous wooden giants on the old church of St. Dunstan's, that used to strike the hours, are now removed to a villa in Regent's Park. Between Chancery Lane and Holborn, many important rebuildings and extensions have been made of recent years; imposing new edifices have been raised, and, in some places, building, with the obliteration of old landmarks, is still going on, so that those who knew it in old days would hardly now recognise the locality. A new Record Office, palatial and imposing, in the Tudor style, now extends from Chancery Lane across to Fetter Lane, covering what used to be Rolls Yard; and the old Rolls Chapel is now incorporated in the newer building. In this massive structure, this fire-proof fortress, are kept all the documentary treasures of the kingdom, beginning with the famous "Domesday Book," of the Conqueror's time. The Records and State Archives of England, so long neglected, have at length found a suitable home. [Illustration: _Lincoln's Inn._]