If there appeared a paragraph in the newspapers, stating that her Majesty’s representative, the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench, had held a solemn Court in the parlour of the ‘Elephant and Tooth-pick,’ the reader would rightly conceive that the Crown and dignity of our Sovereign Lady had suffered some derogation. Yet an equal abasement daily takes place without exciting especial wonder. The subordinates of the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench (who is, by an old law, the Premier Coroner of all England) habitually preside at houses of public entertainment; yet they are no less delegates of Royalty—as the name of their office implies[4]—than the ermined dignitary himself, when surrounded with all the pomp and circumstance of the law’s majesty at Westminster. This is quite characteristic of our thoroughly commercial nation. An action about a money-debt is tried in an imposing manner in a spacious edifice, and with only too great an excess of formality; but for an inquest into the sacrifice of a mere human life, ‘the worst inn’s worst room’ is deemed good enough. In order rightly to determine whether Jones owes Smith five pounds ten, the Goddess of Justice is surrounded with the most imposing insignia, and worshipped in an appropriate temple: but when she is invoked to decide why a human spirit, Footnote 4: It is derived from _a coronâ_ (from the crown), because the coroner, says Coke, “hath conusance in some pleas which are called _placita coronæ_.” ‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, No reckoning made, is sent to its account With all its imperfections on its head;’ she is thrust into the ‘Hole in the Wall,’ the ‘Bag o’ Nails,’ or the parlour of the ‘Two Spies.’ Desirous of having aural and ocular demonstration of the curious manner in which the office of Coroner is now fulfilled, we were attracted, a few weeks since, to the Old Drury Tavern, in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane. Having made our way to a small parlour, we perceived the Majesty of England, as personated on this occasion, enveloped in an ordinary surtout, sitting at the head of a table, and surrounded by a knot of good-humoured faces, who might, if judged from mere appearances, have rallied round their president for some social purpose—only that the cigars and spirits and water had not yet come in. There was nothing official to be seen but a few pens, a sheet or two of paper, an inkstand, and a parish beadle.