originals. But though bands-longer than those still worn by clergymen-have come to be a distinctive feature of legal costume, the bar was slow to adopt falling-collars-regarding them as a strange and fanciful innovation. Whitelock's personal narrative furnishes pleasant testimony that the younger gentry of Charles I.'s England adopted the new collar before the working lawyers.

"At the Quarter-Sessions of Oxford," says Whitelock, speaking of the year 1635, when he was only thirty years

of

age, "I was put into the chair in court, though I was in colored clothes, a sword by my side, and a fallingband, which was unusual for lawyers in those days, and in this garb I gave the charge to the Grand Jury. I took occasion to enlarge on the point of jurisdiction in the temporal courts in matters ecclesiastical, and the antiquity thereof, which I did the rather because the spiritual men began in those days to swell higher than ordinary, and to take it as an injury to the Church that anything savoring of the spirituality, should be within the cognisance of ignorant laymen. The gentlemen and freeholders seemed well pleased with my charge, and the management of the business of the sessions; and said they perceived one might speak as good sense in a fallingband as in a ruff." At this time Whitelock had been about seven years at the bar; but at the Quarter-Sessions the young Templar was playing the part of country squire, and as his words show, he was dressed in a fashion that directly violated professional usage.

Whitelock's speech seems to have been made shortly before the bar accepted the falling-band as an article of dress admissible in courts of law. Towards the close of Charles's reign, such bands were very generally worn in Westminster Hall by the gentlemen of the long robe; and after the Restoration, a barrister would as soon have

thought of appearing at the King's Bench without his gown as without his band. Unlike the bar-bands of the present time-which are lappets of fine lawn, of simple make the bands worn by Charles II.'s lawyers were dainty and expensive articles, such as those which Peacham exclaimed against in the preceding reign. At that date the Templar in prosperous circumstances had his bands made entirely of point lace, or of fine lawn edged with point lace; and as he wore them in society as well as in court, he was constantly requiring a fresh supply of them. Few accidents were more likely to ruffle a Templar's equanimity than a mishap to his band occurring through his own inadvertence or carelessness on the part of a servant. At table the pieces of delicate lace-work were exposed to many dangers. Continually were they stained with wine or soiled with gravy, and the young lawyer was deemed a marvel of amiability who could see his point lace thus defiled and abstain from swearing. "I remember," observes Roger North, when he is showing the perfect control in which his brother Francis kept his temper, at his table a stupid servant spilt a glass of red wine upon his point band and clothes. He only wiped his face and clothes with the napkin, and 'Here,' said he, 'take this away;' and no more."

In The London Spy,' Ned Ward shows that during Queen Anne's reign legal practitioners of the lowest sort were particular to wear bands. Describing the pettifogger, Ward says, "He always talks with as great assurance as if he understood what he pretends to know; and always wears a band, in which lies his gravity and wisdom." At the same period a brisk trade was carried on in Westminster Hall by the sempstresses who manufactured bands and cuffs, lace ruffles, and lawn kerchiefs for the grave counsellors and young gallants of the Inns of Court. "From thence," says the author of 'The London Spy,

"we walked down by the sempstresses, who were very nicely digitising and pleating turnsovers and ruffles for the young students, and coaxing them with amorous looks, obliging cant, and inviting gestures, to give so extravagant a price for what they buy."

From collars of lace and lawn, let us turn to collars of precious metal.

Antiquarians have unanimously rejected the fanciful legend adopted by Dugdale concerning the SS collar, as well as many not less ingenious interpretations of the mystic letters; and at the present time it is almost unanimously settled that the SS collar is the old Lancastrian badge, corresponding to the Yorkist collar of Roses and Suns, and that the S is either the initial of the sentimental word 'Souvenez,' or, or as Mr. Beltz maintains, the initial letter of the sentimental motto, ‘Souvenez-vous de moi.' In Mr. Foss's valuable work, 'The Judges of England,' at the commencement of the seventh volume, the curious reader may find an excellent summary of all that has been or can be said about the origin of this piece of feudal livery, which, having at one time been very generally assumed by all gentle and fairly prosperous partisans of the House of Lancaster, has for many generations been the distinctive badge of a few official persons. In the second year of Henry IV. an ordinance forbade knights and Esquires to wear the collar, save in the king's presence; and in the reign of Henry VIII., the privilege of wearing the collar was taken away from simple esquires by the 'Acte for Reformacyon of Excesse in Apparayle,' 24 Henry VIII. c. 13, which ordained "That no man oneless he be a knight weare any color of Gold, named a color of S." Gradually knights and non-official persons relinquished the decoration; and in our own day the right to bear it is restricted to the two Chief Justices, the Chief Baron, the sergeant-trum

petor, and all the officers of the Heralds' College, pursuivants excepted; "unless," adds Mr. Foss, "the Lord Mayor of London is to be included, whose collar is somewhat similar, and is composed of twenty-eight SS, fourteen roses, thirteen knots, and measures sixty-four inches."

N the stages of the Caroline theatres the lawyer is found with a green bag in his hand; the same is

a

the case in the literature of Queen Anne's reign; and until a comparatively recent date green bags were generally carried in Westminster Hall and in provincial courts by the great body of legal practitioners. From Wycherley's Plain Dealer,' it appears that in the time of Charles II. angry clients were accustomed to revile their lawyers as 'green bag-carriers.' When the litigious Widow Blackacre upbraids the barrister who declines to argue for her, she exclaims-"Impertinent again, and ignorant to me! Gadsboddikins! you puny upstart in the law, to use me so, you green-bag carrier, you murderer of unfortunate causes, the clerk's ink is scarce off of your. fingers." In the same drama, making much play with the green bag, Wycherley indicates the Widow Blackacre's quarrelsome disposition by decorating her with an enormous green reticule, and makes her son the law-student, stagger about the stage in a gown, and under a heavy burden of green bags.

So also in the time of Queen Anne, to say that a man intended to carry a green bag, was the same as say

ing that he meant to adopt the law as a profession. In Dr. Arbuthnot's "History of John Bull,' the prevalence of the phrase is shown by the passage, "I am told, Cousin Diego, you are one of those that have undertaken to manage me, and that you have said you will carry a green bag yourself, rather than we shall make an end of our lawsuit. I'll teach them and you too to manage." It must, however, be borne in mind that in Queen Anne's time, green bags, like white bands, were as generally adopted by solicitors and attorneys, as by members of the bar. In his 'character of a pettifogger' the author of 'The London Spy' observes-" His learning is commonly as little as his honesty, and his conscience much larger than his green bag."

Some years have elapsed since green bags altogether disappeared from our courts of law; but the exact date of their disappearance has hitherto escaped the vigilance and research of Colonel Landman, 'Causidicus,' and other writers who in the pages of that useful and very entertaining publication, Notes and Queries, have asked for information on that point and kindred questions. Evidence sets aside the suggestion that the color of the lawyer's bag was changed from green to red because the proceedings at Queen Caroline's trial rendered green bags odious to the public, and even dangerous to their bearers; for it is a matter of certainty that the leaders of the Chancery and Common Law bars carried red bags at a time considerably anterior to the inquiry into the queen's conduct.

In a letter addressed to the editor of Notes and Queries, a writer who signs himself 'Causidicus,' observes— "When I entered the profession (about fifty years ago) no junior barrister presumed to carry a bag in the Court of Chancery, unless one had been presented to him by a King's Counsel; who, when a junior was advancing in