A strange place is that Prerogative Court, a fine picture of the great out-of-door world; for there Hope and Despair stand sentinels at the doors, and the living seem to jostle the dead in their eager hurry to hunt after what those in the grave have left them. There is a smell as of death about the place, as if grey old departed spirits lurked in the musty folios, and had scattered their ashes amid the yellow and unearthly-looking parchments, which rise up again in clouds of dust, while you turn over the mouldy and crackling leaves, making you sneeze again, while a hundred old echoes take up the sound, until every volume seems to shake and laugh and mock you, as if the grim old dead found it a rare spot to make merry in--to "mop and mow," and play off a thousand devilish antics upon the living. That court is the great mart of merriment and misery, and its open doors too often lead to madness; groaning and moaning, when they open or shut, as if the spirits within wailed over those who come in search of wealth, to return disappointed. Beauty, Virtue, and Innocence also enter there, preceded by Pity; while Hope, with downcast eyes, leads them gently by the hand--her smile subdued, and her sweet countenance sorrowful. But these are angel visitants, who are compelled to appear in that court--who come in tears, and, when their duty is done, pass away for ever. There is a sound of sighs within those walls--a smell of green, stagnant tears: if you listen, you seem to hear the dead rustling among the old parchments: they move like black-beetles, and murmur to one another in an old Saxon language. Wickedness and Wrong have also their lurking-places there--where they lie concealed, and laugh at Right and Justice amid a pile of black-lettered laws, beneath which you find injured Poverty mourning unpitied. The grim judge, who has sat here for hundreds of years, is deaf and blind: he acts but for the dead--the living he can neither hear nor see--but ever sits with his elbow resting on a pile of musty volumes, mute as a marble image. It is a place filled with solemn associations--the ante-room of Life-in-Death.