The Rock Ahead: A Novel. (Vol. 2)

Transcriber's Notes: Page scans provided by Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=zKYxAQAAMAAJ (Cornell Uiversity)
The clearance effected under the superintendence of the Office of Works, for the amalgamation under one roof of the various Courts of Law, has carried away a large portion of Clement's Inn, and has obliterated the pillared entrance to that dusky but genial home of the shady and impecunious. In the days of our story, however, Inn and entrance were still there; the former tenanted by human sheep of various degrees of blackness--roistering government-office clerks, with the Insolvent Court--which at the outset of their career had been but a light cloud as small as a man's hand, but which year by year had assumed larger and more definite proportions--ever lowering over them; third-rate attorneys, who combined law with discount, doing little bills for ten and twenty pounds with the aforenamed government clerks, and carefully putting in an appearance at Somerset House on pay-days to receive their money, or the refresher which was to induce the withholding of the document--it is always a document --until another quarter had elapsed; agents for companies of all kinds of limited and unlimited liability; newspaper writers obliged to have cheap chambers in the neighbourhood of their offices; foreigners representing continental firms, and wanting a cheap and quasi-respectable address; an actor or two, a score of needy men-about-town, and a few Jews. Round the pillars seethed and bubbled a scum of humanity of the nastiest kind--vendors of the fried fish and the pickled whelk, boot-blackers of abnormally horrid appearance: and emaciated children from the neighbouring Clare Market and the adjoining courts, thieves and impostors from their infancy, hung about the cab-rank, and added to the general filth and squalor. A pleasant Slough of Despond, that little spot, now standing bare and cleared, surrounded by the balmy Holywell, the virtuous Wych, with Drury Lane running from it at right-angles, and the dirtiest corner of the great legal cobweb of courts and alleys at its back.