The mention of Brodie reminds me that I spent a year copying old deeds in his murky chamber, 49 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where nobody could read his handwriting except his clerk (appropriately yclept Inkpen), and when he couldn’t it was handed back to Mr. Brodie for exposition, wherein if he himself failed, as was sometimes the case, he had to write a new Opinion.  Inkpen was a character, as a self-taught entomologist, breeding in me then the rabies of collecting moths and beetles, as a couple of boxes full of such can still prove.  He lived at Chelsea, near the Botanical Gardens there; and attributed his wonderful finds of strange insects in his own pocket-handkerchief garden to stray caterpillars and flies, &c., that came his way from among the packets of foreign plants.  He used also to catch small fowl on passengers’ coats and blank walls, as he passed on his daily walks to his office and back, having pill-boxes in his pocket, and pins inside his hat to secure the spoil.  In the course of years he had amassed butterflies and beetles to so valuable an extent, that when he was compelled by adverse fortune to sell his cabinets by auction at Stevens’s, he netted L1200 for his collection:  this he told me in later years himself; immediately after the sale, he commenced collecting anew,—­and having been made curator of Lincoln’s Inn Fields (through Mr. Brodie’s interest), he soon found an infinity of new insects,—­derived perhaps from the Surgeon’s Hall Museum, or straying to the nine acres of that Garden,—­is it not the area of Cephren’s Pyramid?—­as a refuge for them out of smoky London.  The good man always brought a new flower to look at every morning while at desk work; it lived in an old inkbottle of water, till one happy day I bethought me charitably of giving him a pretty China vase,—­that good man, I say, is now long since gone to a world of light and beauty—­whence, I am sure, flowers and butterflies cannot be excluded.

About the same time this memorable matter may receive a notice.  One day at Brodie’s chambers we heard a riotous noise in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and running out, I found that the Duke of Wellington, for some political offence, was being mobbed,—­and that too on the 18th of June!  He was calmly walking his horse, surrounded by roaring roughs,—­a groom being behind him at some distance, but otherwise alone.  Disgusted at the scene, I jumped on the steps of Surgeon’s Hall, and shouted out—­Waterloo, Waterloo!  That one word turned the tide of execrations into cheers, and the Iron Duke passed me silently with a military salute:  as the mob were thus easily converted ("mob” being, as we conveyancers say, a short form for “mobile”, changeable) and escorted our national hero to his home in safety, I really think the little incident worth recording.  We are just now in the throes of such a mobocracy,—­and know how much one firm policeman can avail to calm a riot.  While speaking of the Duke and Apsley House, let me add here another word of some interest.