? The figures were
grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and
chatter about that area, less gothic in appearance? or is the splutter
of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as the
little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered?

They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and
the library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the
hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged
horse that stood over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed
those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of the
Paper-buildings?--my first hint of allegory! They must account to me
for these things, which I miss so greatly.

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but
the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement
awful! It is become common and profane. The old benchers had it almost
sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might
not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade.
You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them. We walk on
even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J----ll, ever
ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie
a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated
Thomas Coventry?--whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and
elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and
path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the
scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors,
who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his
insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His
growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth
or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most
repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors
of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He
took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under
the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat
red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by
adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace.

By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive
gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but
that and their b