We passed on from the court, and crossing the road went through the squares of Gray’s Inn, down Chancery Lane, through the little iron gate into Lincoln’s Inn, round through the old square,--than which we know no place in London more conducive to suicide; and the new square,--which has a gloom of its own, not so potent, and savouring only of madness, till at last we found ourselves in the Temple Gardens. I do not know why we had thus clung to the purlieus of the Law, except it was that he was telling us how in his early days, when he had been sent away from Cambridge,--as on this occasion he acknowledged to us, for an attempt to pull the tutor’s nose, in revenge for a supposed insult,--he had intended to push his fortunes as a barrister. He pointed up to a certain window in a dark corner of that suicidal old court, and told us that for one year he had there sat at the feet of a great Gamaliel in Chancery, and had worked with all his energies. Of course we asked him why he had left a prospect so alluring. Though his answers to us were not quite explicit, we think that he did not attempt to conceal the truth. He learned to drink, and that Gamaliel took upon himself to rebuke the failing, and by the end of that year he had quarrelled irreconcilably with his family. There had been great wrath at home when he was sent from Cambridge, greater wrath when he expressed his opinion upon certain questions of religious faith, and wrath to the final severance of all family relations when he told the chosen Gamaliel that he should get drunk as often as he pleased. After that he had “taken refuge among the lower orders,” and his life, such as it was, had come of it.