Goodness knows, I am not an optimist, and give but too much reason to be accused of _nil admirari_ tendencies; yet I cannot help thinking that if on this earth there exists a body of men grandly wise, generously eloquent, nobly impartial, and sternly incorruptible, those men are the judges of England. Come away though, now, Don Cleophas; we must go further afield. The case that is “on” just now is not of sufficient interest to detain us; though here is an episode sufficiently grotesque. An old lady is entitled to some damages, or to some verdict, or to some money or apology, or, at all events, something from somebody. My Lord Owlett suggests a compromise, and instructs counsel to ask her what she will take to settle matters. “What will you take?” asks the gentleman in the bob-tailed wig of the old lady. Now the old lady is very deaf, and merely shakes her head at the counsel, informing the jury, in confidence, that she is “very hard o’ hearin’.” “His Lordship wants to know what you will take?” asks the counsel again; this time bawling as loud as ever he can in the old lady’s ear. “I thank his lordship kindly,” the ancient dame answers stoutly, “and if it’s no illconwenience to him, _I’ll take a little warm ale_!” And, amid a roar of laughter from the spectators, we quit the Court of Queen’s Bench. Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus’s carved roof-tree, so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir Charles Barry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall to that which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of ’34. There was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen Gothic candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, where the eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet benches and rich carpets, and where the Lord High Chancellor sits on the woolsack, like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. In my time, the keeper of her Majesty’s conscience and the Great Seal sat in a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth from the Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous footsteps on the Mall, St. James’s; how many thousand footsteps—thousands?—millions rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up and down! Westminster Hall is always cool: well it may be so; the dust was laid and the air refrigerated centuries since by the tears and the sighs of ruined suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is! what reminiscences it conjures up—they will _not_ be laid in the Red Sea—of the gorgeous banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of Laud and Strafford, and of Laud and Strafford’s master; of Mr. Jonathan Wild’s ancestor walking the hall with a straw in his shoe; of poor little Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, standing their trial here on a velvet-covered platform in the midst of the hall, for treason to Bloody Mary.