Then whets and claps its silver wings;
  And, till prepared for longer flight,
  Waves in its plumes the various light. 
  How well the skilful gardener drew,
  Of flowers and herbs, this dial new! 
  Where, from above, the milder sun
  Does through a fragrant zodiac run: 
  And, as it works, the industrious bee
  Computes its time as well as we. 
  How could such sweet and wholesome hours
  Be reckon’d, but with herbs and flowers?[1]

The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast vanishing.  Most of them are dried up, or bricked over.  Yet, where one is left, as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile!  Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips, in the square of Lincoln’s-inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured.  They are gone, and the spring choked up.  The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish.  Why not then gratify children, by letting them stand?  Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.  They are awakening images to them at least.  Why must every thing smack of man, and mannish?  Is the world all grown up?  Is childhood dead?  Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?  The figures were grotesque.  Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less gothic in appearance? or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as the little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered?

They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and the library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not at all resemble.  What is become of the winged horse that stood over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of the Paper-buildings?—­my first hint of allegory!  They must account to me for these things, which I miss so greatly.

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful!  It is become common and profane.  The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least.  They might not be sided or jostled.  Their air and dress asserted the parade.  You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them.  We walk on even terms with their successors.  The roguish eye of J——­ll, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it.  But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas Coventry?—­whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion’s, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving