pectator with his short
face pacing up and down the road; or dear Oliver Goldsmith in the
summer-house, perhaps meditating about the next 'Citizen of the World,'
or the new suit that Mr. Filby, the tailor, is fashioning for him, or
the dunning letter that Mr. Newbery has sent. Treading heavily on the
gravel, and rolling majestically along in a snuff-coloured suit, and a
wig that sadly wants the barber's powder and irons, one sees the
Great Doctor step up to him (his Scotch lackey following at the
lexicographer's heels, a little the worse for port wine that they have
been taking at the Mitre), and Mr. Johnson asks Mr. Goldsmith to come
home and take a dish of tea with Miss Williams. Kind faith of Fancy! Sir
Roger and Mr. Spectator are as real to us now as the two doctors and the
boozy and faithful Scotchman. The poetical figures live in our memory
just as much as the real personages,--and as Mr. Arthur Pendennis was of
a romantic and literary turn, by no means addicted to the legal pursuits
common in the neighbourhood of the place, we may presume that he was
cherishing some such poetical reflections as these, when, upon the
evening after the events recorded in the last chapter, the young
gentleman chose the Temple Gardens as a place for exercise and
meditation.

On the Sunday evening the Temple is commonly calm. The chambers are for
the most part vacant: the great lawyers are giving grand dinner-parties
at their houses in the Belgravian or Tyburnian districts; the agreeable
young barristers are absent, attending those parties, and paying their
respects to Mr. Kewsy's excellent claret, or Mr. Justice Ermine's
accomplished daughters the uninvited are partaking of the economic joint
and the modest half-pint of wine at the Club, entertaining themselves,
and the rest of the company in the Club-room, with Circuit jokes and
points of wit and law. Nobody is in chambers at all, except poor Mr.
Cockle, who is ill, and whose laundress is making him gruel; or Mr.
Toodle, who is an amateur of the flute, and whom you may hear piping
solitary from his chambers in the second floor; or young Tiger, the
student, from whose open windows comes a great gush of cigar smoke, and
at whose door are a quantity of dishes and covers, bearing the insignia
of Dicks' or the Cock. But stop! Whither does Fancy lead us? It is
vacation time; and with the exception of Pendennis, nobody is in
Chambers at all.

Perhaps it was solitude, then, which drove Pe