Here and there in London by James Ewing Ritchie

Is in the Strand -- or in Westminster -- and the contrast between its silence and stillness and the bustle of the streets is something wonderful. You feel as you enter as if you were in a charmed land. With Tennyson's lotus-eaters you exclaim, "There is no joy but calm. Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things? " Charles Lamb's description of the South Sea House might have been penned for a Government Office. The place seems to belong not to the living present. The windows, double glazed, keep out the roar of the outside world. The chairs and tables, of massive mahogany, seem as if of the time of the ancients. The Turkey carpet has a smack of the primitive political Eden, ere man sinned, and Lord John Russell introduced his Reform Bill. This may be a railroad age, but it is not in a Government Office that that truth is recognised. The young men are generally reading the papers, or eating lunch; the seniors are doing the same, but in a more dignified manner. In an office where there are several, to find a couple at real hard work from ten till four is, I fear, a rarity.

According to Mr. Knight, when Henry VIII. had stripped Wolsey of Whitehall, and other possessions, he constructed there, for the amusement of his leisure, a tennis-court, a bowling-green, and a cock-pit. The tennis-court and the bowling-green have left no traces. The cockpit went through a variety of transmutations, till it settled down into a treasury. In the reign of Anne, the lord high treasurer Godolphin sat three or four times a week at the cock-pit, "to determine and settle matters relating to the public treasure and revenues. " This was the old building fronting the banqueting house, which Mr. Barry has recently metamorphosed into a magnificent wing of his uniform edifice. The old office of Godolphin, however, is but a small part of the modern treasury. The offices of the more important functionaries are in the large building behind, which fronts the esplanade in St. James's Park. Several offices were destroyed in 1733, in order to erect the present building facing the parade, the expense of which was estimated at 9,000 pounds. The facade consists of a double basement of the Doric order, and a projection in the centre, on which are four Ionic pillars supporting an entablature and pediment.