EARNED 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 ret