We have now arrived at Doctors' Commons, and our engraving over-leaf represents the Prerogative Court, one of the chambers in which the wills of the dead are deposited. Through those doors many a beating and anxious heart enters to return disappointed, or half delirious with delight, through dreaming of the many pleasures which riches will procure. What thousands of human beings, fluttering between hope and fear, have passed through the shadow of that arched gateway which opens into St. Paul's Churchyard; many to repass the possessors of riches, but never again to find that sweet sleep which hard-handed industry brought, and which moderate competency had never before heaved a sigh for! Legacies left, which proved a curse instead of a comfort, by arousing ambitious thoughts to soar amid airy speculations, where hundreds of captivating bubbles floated, tinged with the richest hues, until all in a moment burst, and left but a naked desolation behind--a hideous barrenness--never seen while those painted vapours danced before the eye. Wealth, over which Care ever after kept watch with sleepless eyes and furrowed brow, uncertain into which stream of enjoyment he should launch with his freight, and so pondered until old age and then death came, and instead of the castle he had so long contemplated purchasing, he was installed without a tear into the narrow coffin, and borne without a sigh to the grave. Others, again, raised from enduring and patient poverty to undreamed-of comfort, because he who would not have advanced them a shilling, would it have saved them from starvation and death, was now powerless; his greatest agony, when he passed away, being the thought that he could not carry his unforgiving vengeance beyond the grave; that he had not power to disinherit the child whom he spurned and hated. We have gazed on those dark-bound volumes in the Prerogative Will-Office, and thought that if the dead were permitted to return again, what ghastly forms would enter that room, shrieking aloud names once beloved, and blotting out for ever such as they had in their blind passion inserted. One stroke of the pen, and she who sits weeping and plying her needle in one of the neighbouring attics (her children crying around her for bread) might have been trailing the roses around the trellised porch of some beautiful cottage, while they were playing on the green lawn, strangers to sorrow and hunger.