"Opinionum commenta delet dies, naturæ judicia confirmat."—CICERO. "Time, which obliterates the fictions of opinion, confirms the decisions of nature." Whoever has wandered to the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, will have found himself in one of the "solitudes of London"—one of those places which, interspersed here and there amidst the busy current that rushes along every street and ally, seem quite out of the human life-tide, and furnish serene spots, a dead calm, in the midst of tumult and agitation. Here a lawyer may con over a "glorious uncertainty," a surgeon a difficult case, a mathematician the general doctrine of probability, or the Chevalier d'Industrie the particular case of the _habitat_ of his next dinner; but, unless you have some such need of abstraction from the world, these places are heart-sinkingly dull. You see few people; perhaps there may be a sallow-looking gentleman, in a black coat, with a handful of papers, rushing into "chambers;" or a somewhat more rubicund one in blue, walking seriously out: the very stones are remarkably round and salient, as if from want, rather than from excess, of friction. The atmosphere from the distance comes charged with the half-spent, booming hum of population. Immediately around you, all is comparatively silent. If you are in a carriage, it seems every moment to come in contact with fresh surfaces, and "beats a roll" of continued vibrations; or, if a carriage happen to pass you, it seems to make more noise than half a dozen vehicles anywhere else. You may observe a long façade, of irregular elevations—upright parallelograms, called habitable houses; but, for aught you see, half of them may have been deserted: the dull sameness of the façade is broken only by half a dozen Ionic columns, which, notwithstanding their number, seem very serious and very solitary. You may, perhaps, imagine that they bear a somewhat equivocal relation to the large house before which they stand. You may fancy them to be architectural relics, inconveniently large for admission to some depository within, or that they are intended as a sort of respectable garniture to the very plain house which they partly serve to conceal or embellish; or quiz them as you please, for architects cannot do everything, nor at once convert a very ugly house into a very beautiful temple. But, stop there!—for temple it is—ay, perhaps, as human temples always are, not altogether unprofaned; but not so desecrated, we trust, but that it may yet contain the elements of its own purification. It enshrines, reader, a gem of great value, which nothing extrinsic can improve, which no mere art can embellish—a treasure gathered from the ample fields of nature, and which can be enriched or adorned only from the same exhaustless store. Though humble, indeed, the tenement, yet, were it humbler still, though it were composed of reeds, and covered in with straw, it would remain hallowed to science.