One of my earliest strolls in London revisited lately, was to the old haunts I had once known so well at Lincoln’s Inn. I had walked along the new embankment lost in wonder and admiration. The most incorrigible _laudator temporis acti_ cannot but admit that nineteenth century London has there done something and possesses something which any city on this earth may well be proud of! And so I came to the Temple, and rambling through its renovated gardens and courts thought how infinitely more inviting they looked than anything in Belgrave Square, or Mayfair! _Templa quam dilecta!_ Why, if only a wall could be built around the precincts high enough and strong enough to shut out London sounds and London smells and London atmosphere, one might be almost as well there as in Magdalen at Oxford! And Alsatia too, its next door neighbour to the eastward, all ravaged and routed out, its mysterious courts and light-abhorring alleys exposed to the flouting glare of a sunshine baking a barren extent, devoted apparently to dead cats and potsherds! That Whitefriars district used to be a favourite exploring ground of mine after the publication of _The Fortunes of Nigel_. How the copper captains, if condemned to walk their former haunts, would slink away in search of the cover of darksome nooks no longer to be found! What would Miss Trapbois’s ghost, wandering in the unsheltered publicity of the new embankment, think of the cataclysm which has overwhelmed the world she knew! Then, marvelling at the ubiquitous railway bridges and arches, which seem to return again and again like the recurring horrors of a nightmare dream, I passed westward, where the Fleet Prison is not, and where even Temple Bar is no more, till I came to Chancery Lane, which seemed to retain much of its old dinginess, and passed thence under the unchanged old gateway into Lincoln’s Inn Old Square, where my father’s chambers were, and where I used to go to him with my nonsense verses. Old Square looks much as it used to look, I think. And the recollection darted across my mind--who shall say why?--of a queer-looking shambling figure, whom my father pointed out to me one day from the window of his chambers. “That,” said he, “is Jockey Bell, perhaps the first conveyancer in England. He probably knows more of the law of real property than any man breathing.” He was a rather short, squab-looking, and very shabby figure, who walked, I think, a little lame. He came, I was told, from the north country, and spoke with a strong Northumbrian accent. “It is a dreadful thing to have to decipher an opinion of his,” said my father; “he is said to have three handwritings--one when he is sober, which he can read himself; one when he is drunk, which his clerk can read; and one next morning after being drunk, which no human being can read!”