About nine o'clock in the
evening, if you went up-stairs you would find a large room with benches
capable of accommodating, I should think, a hundred, or a hundred and
fifty persons. This room was generally well filled, and by their
appearance the audience was one you would call respectable. The entrance
fee entitled you to refreshment, and that refreshment, in the shape of
intoxicating liquor, was by that time before each visitant. After
waiting a few minutes, a rustle at the entrance would cause you to turn
your eyes in that direction, when, heralded by a crier with a gown and a
staff of office, exclaiming, "Make way for my Lord Chief Baron," that
illustrious individual would be seen wending his way to his appointed
seat. The man I write of was then about thirty-five, but he appeared
much older, and in his robes of office and with his judicial wig had
almost a venerable appearance. Having seated himself and bowed to the
bar--one of them they called the double of Brougham had been a dissenting
minister (he is dead now--he died "game," they told me)--the Lord Chief
Baron called for "a cigar and glass of brandy and water, and, having
observed that the waiter was in the room and that he hoped gentlemen
would give their orders, the proceedings of the evening commenced. A
jury was selected; the prosecutor opened his case, which, to suit the
depraved taste of his patrons, was invariably one of seduction or crim.
con. Witnesses were examined and cross-examined, the females being men
dressed up in women's clothes, and everything was done that could be to
pander to the lowest propensities of depraved humanity. I do not believe
the audience could have stood this if it had not been for the drink. As
it was, I believe many a youth fresh from home felt a little ashamed of
himself that he should be in such company listening to such unmitigated
ribaldry, but these reflections were soon drowned in the flowing bowl,
and the lad, if he blushed at first, soon learned to laugh. I write of
the time when the railway mania had filled London with overpaid
engineers, and attorneys, and parliamentary witnesses, only too anxious
to see life, as they called it, and by whom this beastly entertainment
was frequented night after night. I dare not even attempt to give a
faint outline of the proceedings. After the defence, came the summing
up, which men about town told you was a model of wit, but in which the
wit bore but a small proportion