This is Westminster Hall. You know it at once. To your left is one door for Parliament; to your right are seven, for the lawyers. If you peep into the first of these legal entrances, you will probably see the cake-woman; and if the court is sitting you will certainly find an eager knot of grey-bearded, spectacled, wigged, and gowned barristers, engaged on “three corners,” Bath buns, and pennyworths of plum gingerbread. Passing through this reminiscence of schooldays, you will bewilder yourself among a series of doors that shut one upon another. You will possibly avoid the cross-cutting and divergent passages, and, with the help of a sad policeman, lifting a heavy crimson curtain, you will take off your hat, and find yourself in a court of justice. The first thing you look for is a “place,” which you find high up in the back seats; and when this has been climbed into, with more or less noise, you find yourself facing the bench. By the bench, of course I mean the judges. They are peculiar. Their dress is rather startling at first, till you get used to it; but it is nothing to their caps, which are represented by a little black spot on the top of the wig, and, therefore, may be said to out-muffin the muffin cap of the Bluecoat boy. You may, perhaps, imagine that a remorseful, or, perhaps, shamefaced feeling on the part of the last invented judge has led to his contenting himself with a mere white spot. But be this as it may, from reasons of either dress or feature, our judges do not quite look like ordinary human beings; at all events, the casual observer is sure to deny them that privilege. One likens a celebrated dispenser of justice to a benevolent and intellectual gorilla; another believes that all judges give one some dim idea of a blinking, dozy kind of barn owl; a third suggests good old ladies—motherly persons, given to advice and management, and the having of their own way; while one more daring has even compared the celebrated and, as I said before, “newly invented” summer up, to a jolly apple-cheeked old maid, sitting in judgment upon her married sisters. Perhaps it is not until these humourists see them as judges in their own cause that they discover them to be neither blind, weak, nor old-womanish. [Illustration: The Plaintiff. The Defendant.] [Illustration: The Jury.]