THE JUDGES' DINNER.
Above the old Court is a stately dining-room, wherein, during the Old Bailey sittings, the dinners are given by the sheriffs to the judges and aldermen, the Recorder, Common Sergeant, city pleaders, and a few visitors. Marrow-puddings and rump-steaks are always provided. Two dinners, exact duplicates, are served each day, at 3 and 5 o'clock; and the judges relieve each other, but aldermen have eaten both dinners; and a chaplain, who invariably presided at the lower end of the table, thus ate two dinners a day for ten years. Theodore Hook admirably describes a Judges' Dinner in his Gilbert Gurney. In 1807-8, the dinners for three sessions, nineteen days, cost Sheriff Phillips £35 per day—£665; 145 dozen of wine, consumed at the above dinners, £450: total £1,115. The amount is now considerably greater, as the sessions are held monthly.
Outside in the lobbies and hall rooms, passages and corridors adjacent to and connected with the Old Bailey Court there is always a crowd of lawyers, policemen, hangers-on, countrymen, cadgers, and persons anxious to become spectators, females of the poorer class, members of the aristocratic swell mob, sneak thieves and pickpockets, all curious to know how matters are going on inside with their friends or associates in crime or misfortune, and among them all, rushing hither and thither, chatting and joking, conferring with his clients, and nodding familiarly to the police and the officers of the Court, may be seen the sharpest legal bird in the world. I mean the regular Old Bailey practitioner, who could take a penny from a dead man's eyes, rob an altar, or cheat the widow and orphan, and still prove to his own satisfaction that it was done for a good and laudable purpose.
LOADING THE PRISON VAN.
A not uncommon sight in the vicinity of police offices and petty Courts, in London, is the noisy, brawling discharge of prisoners, who are turned out on the streets in the morning, after having been locked up all night for trifling offences, or disorderly conduct and intoxication.
Their unlucky companions, who have received sentences of imprisonment, are taken from the Courts to the places of confinement in which they are to pay the penalty of their indiscretion or crime. Every morning there is a dreadful row and confusion at the Bow street police office, when the prisoners are brought out to be placed in the prison wagon or "van," in which they are transported to Holloway, Milbank or Newgate prisons. A large crowd assembles daily to witness the embarkation of these poor wretches for their new residences. Fighting women, squalling children, patient policemen, and drunken blackguards are among the details of these assemblages. There is a strong able bodied virago, with her dress hanging to her form in shreds, who has just tossed her soiled bonnet madly among the crowd, with a series of shrieks, and three policemen are hardly sufficient to restrain her, while she is being helped into the "Van." At last she is locked up with other unruly personages inside of the iron door, in a dark box, where she may swear away to her heart's content for a ride of five to ten miles.
And now let us take a look at the Justice Room of the Mansion House, which is only a few rods distant from the Old Bailey.
THE MANSION HOUSE.