cient banking house, the
original of Tellson's Bank in a "Tale of Two Cities." The demolition of
Temple Bar made necessary some alterations in the bank, too; and when I
was last there the front of the old building which so long defied time and
change was boarded up.

Chancery Lane, opposite The Temple, running from Fleet Street to
Holborn--a distance only a little greater than that between the Fifth and
Sixth Avenues in New York--is the principal pathway through the "perplexed
and troublous valley of the shadow of the law." At either end of it there
are fresh green spots; but the lane itself is wholly given up to legal
dust and darkness. Facing it, on the farther side of Holborn, in a
position corresponding with that of The Temple at the Fleet Street
extremity, is Gray's Inn, especially attractive to me on account of the
long grassy enclosure within its innermost court, so smooth and bright and
well-kept that I always stopt to gaze longingly at it through the railed
barrier which shuts strangers out--as if here were a tennis lawn reserved
for the exclusive vise of frisky barristers.

At No. 2 Holborn Court, in Gray's Inn, David Copperfield, on his return
from abroad near the end of the story, found the rooms of that rising
young lawyer, Mr. Thomas Traddles. There was a great scuttling and
scampering when David knocked at the door; for Traddles was at that moment
playing puss-in-the-corner with Sophy and "the girls." Thavies' Inn, on
the other side of Holborn, a little farther east, is no longer enclosed;
it is only a little fragment of shabby street which starts, with mouth
wide open, to run out of Holborn Circus, and stops short, after a few
reds, without having got anywhere. The faded houses look as if they
belonged to East Broadway; and in one of them lived Mrs. Jellyby....

The buildings within the large enclosure of Lincoln's Inn are a strange
mixture of aged dulness and new splendor; but the old houses and the old
court-rooms seem to be without exception dark, stuffy, and inconvenient.
Here were the chambers of Kenge and Carboy, and the dirty and disorderly
offices of Sergeant Snubbin, counsel for the defendant in the suit of
Bardell against Pickwick. Here the Lord Chancellor sat, in the heart of
the fog, to hear the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

At the back of the Inn, in the shabby-genteel square called Lincoln's Inn
Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn was murdered in his rusty apartment. The story of
"Bleak House" rev