Chapter XXXI

Which Is All About The Law, And Sundry Great Authorities

Learned Therein

Scattered about, in various holes and corners of the Temple, are

certain dark and dirty chambers, in and out of which, all the morning

in vacation, and half the evening too in term time, there may be seen

constantly hurrying with bundles of papers under their arms, and

protruding from their pockets, an almost uninterrupted succession of

lawyers' clerks. There are several grades of lawyers' clerks. There is

the articled clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in

perspective, who runs a tailor's bill, receives invitations to parties,

knows a family in Gower Street, and another in Tavistock Square; who

goes out of town every long vacation to see his father, who keeps live

horses innumerable; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks.

There is the salaried clerk - out of door, or in door, as the case may be

who devotes the major part of his thirty shillings a week to his

Personal pleasure and adornments, repairs half-price to the Adelphi

Theatre at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the cider

cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion which

expired six months ago. There is the middle- aged copying clerk, with

a large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there are

the office lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for

boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night, for saveloys and

porter, and think there's nothing like 'life.' There are varieties of the

genus, too numerous to recapitulate, but however numerous they may

be, they are all to be seen, at certain regulated business hours,

hurrying to and from the places we have just mentioned.

These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession,

where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and

numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and

torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and

emolument of the practitioners of the law. They are, for the most part,

low-roofed, mouldy rooms, where innumerable rolls of parchment,

which have been perspiring in secret for the last century, send forth

an agreeable odour, which is mingled by day with the scent of the dry-

rot, and by night with the various exhalations which arise from damp

cloaks, festering umbrellas, and the coarsest tallow candles.

About half-past seven o'clock in the evening, some ten days or a

fortnight after Mr Pickwick and his friends returned to London, there

hurried into one of these offices, an individual in a brown coat and

brass buttons, whose long hair was scrupulously twisted round the

rim of his napless hat, and whose soiled drab trousers were so tightly

strapped over his Blucher boots, that his knees threatened every

moment to start from their concealment. He produced from his coat

The Pickwick Papers