Chapter 31

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