which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be

sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly

fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate

with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and

outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where

he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of

members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they

are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless

cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping kneedeep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded

heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with

serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various

solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from

their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—

ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for

truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk

gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits,

issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly

nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting

candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would

never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and

admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the

streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred

from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to

the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks

into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are

all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its

decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its

worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard,

which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress

borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance,

which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the

right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so

overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an

honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does

not often give—the warning, Suffer any wrong that can be done you ‟

rather than come here!”

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky

afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or

three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors

before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and

gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or

whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no

crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in

hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand

writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers

invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and

Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the

side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little

mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its

sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible

judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party

to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries

some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, principally

consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has

come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal

application to purge himself of his contempt,” which, being a solitary ‟

surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about

accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge,

he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are