receive from the cashier of the office two sovereigns?" The answers were affirmative; and having received them with lively satisfaction, the enterprising youth ran to the nearest cook-shop, and devoured three sixpenny plates of beef. Had he not secured his appointment, he would have expended but a third of his remaining fund on that night's supper. So runs the story of John Campbell's first entrance into London,—a story which bears upon its face so many doubtful features and suspicious peculiarities, that this writer would be sorry to pledge his name for its truth.

From his first appearance in town, Alexander Wedderburn lived with ostentation. Until he raised himself to lucrative practice, he indulged in all the pleasures and pursuits of a fashionable Templar. His chambers were commodious and luxuriously furnished; in costume he challenged comparison with the smartest gallants of the town; and writers, wits, and actors, with whom he consorted in taverns and coffee-rooms, never accused him of stinginess or poverty-qualities in those days too frequently attributed by popular prejudice to young Scotchmen who were neither indigent nor avaricious. That he resembled his countrymen in his dullness was the opinion of detractors; but no charge of pecuniary meanness was ever preferred against him. As soon as clients came, the ambitious Scotchman angled for more with the baits of increased ostentation and patrician style. On taking office as Solicitor General, he spent a year's income on a service of plate, and his horses were the admiration of London. Legal dignitaries had laid down their coachesand-six; but Wedderburn's chariots, traveling carirages, and teams of two or four horses, surpassed those of many free-handed and opulent members of the high nobility. Whilst he held the seals he never drove through London without creating a stir by the costliness and perfect style

of his equipages-consisting of two coaches built exactly on the same pattern, and each of them drawn by four superb steeds. During Erskine's brief chancellorship the dignity of the law was properly sustained by his stud and household, and by a grateful and liberal hospitality to the members of his party and his profession. But Eldon introduced a change for the worse. Under his supremacy, the Chancellor's private carriage was a miserable, battered, jingling, ramshackle coach, drawn by two lean, luckless brutes, that roused the derision of the street-boys. Frequently the Chancellor, purse in hand, drove from Bedford Square or Hamilton Place to Westminster in a hackney-coach; and on one occasion he actually left in a common hackney-carriage some state papers of high importance. Fortunately, the driver was either honest or drunk, and promptly restored the documents. But for this unseemly economy Lord Eldon had a precedent in the conduct of the penurious Kenyon, who made weekly trips to his desolate farm-house at Richmond in an antique coach, known on the Richmond road as the "Chief Justice's hearse." But enough of horses and chariots. In the present generation at the opening of Michaelmas term our legal dignitaries and queen's counsel drive in a long procession from the Chancellor's house to Westminster: but eminent lawyers are no longer remarkable for distinctive equipages, and fashion does not require them to lavish money on horse-dealers and coach-makers. Some of our foremost living judges and advocates are, however, honorably known in hunting counties.

IV.

LAWYERS AT HOME.

A

CHAPTER XVIII.

LAW-STUDENT of the present day finds it difficult to realize the brightness and domestic decency which characterized the Inns of Court in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Under existing circumstances women of character and social position avoid the gardens and terraces of Gray's Inn and the Temple.

Attended by men, or protected by circumstances that guard them from impertinence and scandal, gentlewomen can without discomfort pass and repass the walls of our legal colleges; but in most cases a lady enters them under conditions that announce even to casual passers the object of her visit. In her carriage, during the later hours of the day, a barrister's wife may drive down the Middle Temple Lane, or through the gate of Lincoln's Inn, and wait in King's Bench Walk or New Square, until her husband, putting aside clients and papers, joins her for the homeward drive. But even thus placed, sitting in her carriage and guarded by servants, she usually prefers to fence off inquisitive eyes by a bonnetveil, or the blinds of her carriage windows. On Sunday, the wives and daughters of gentle families brighten the dingy passages of the Temple, and the sombre courts of Lincoln's Inn: for the musical services of the grand

church and little chapel are amongst the religious entertainments of the town. To those choral celebrations ladies go, just as they are accustomed to enter any metropolitan church; and after service they can take a turn in the gardens of either Society without drawing upon themselves unpleasant attention. So also, unattended by men, ladies are permitted to inspect the floral exhibitions with which Mr. Broome, the Temple gardener, annually entertains London sightseers.

But, save on these and a few similar occasions and conditions, gentlewomen avoid an Inn of Court as they would a barrack-yard, unless they have secured the special attendance of at least one member of the society. The escort of a barrister or student alters the case. What barrister, young or old, cannot recall mirthful eyes that, with quick shyness, have turned away from his momentary notice, as in answer to the rustling of silk, or stirred by sympathetic consciousness of woman's noiseless presence, he has raised his face from a volume of reports, and seen two or three timorous girls peering through the golden haze of a London morning into the library of his Inn? What man thus drawn away for thirty seconds from prosaic toil, has not in that half minute remembered the faces of happy rural homes,— has not recalled old days when his young pulses beat cordial welcome to similar intruders upon the stillness of the Bodleian, or the tranquil seclusion of Trinity library? What occupant of dreary chambers in the Temple, reading this page, cannot look back to a bright day when young, beautiful, and pure as sanctity, Lilian, or Kate, or Olive, entered his room radiant with smiles, delicate in attire, and musical with gleesome gossip about country neighbors and the life of a joyous home?

Seldom does a Templar of the present generation receive so fair and innocent a visitor. To him the presence

of a gentlewoman in his court is an occasion for ingenious conjecture; encountered on his staircase she is a cause of lively astonishment. His guests are men, more or less addicted to tobacco; his business callers are 30licitors and their clerks; in his vestibule the masculine emissaries of tradesmen may sometimes be found-headwaiters from neighboring taverns, pot-boys from the 'Cock" and the "Rainbow." A printer's devil may from time to time knock at his door. But of womensuch women as he would care to mention to his mother and sisters he sees literally nothing in his dusty, illordered, but not comfortless rooms. He has a laundress, one of a class on whom contemporary satire has been rather too severe.

Feminine life of another sort lurks in the hidden places of the law colleges, shunning the gaze of strangers by daylight; and even when it creeps about under cover of night, trembling with a sense of its own incurable shame. But of this sad life, the bare thought of which sends a shivering through the frame of every man whom God has blessed with a peaceful home and wholesome associations, nothing shall be said in this page.

In past time the life of the law colleges was very different in this respect. When they ceased to be ecclesiastics, and fixed themselves in the hospices which soon after the reception of their gowned tenants were styled Inns of Courts, our lawyers took unto themselves wives, who were both fair and discreet. And having so made women flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, they brought them to homes within the immediate vicinity of their collegiate walls, and sometimes within the walls themselves. Those who would appreciate the life of the Inns in past centuries, and indeed in times within the memory of living men, should bear this in mind. When he was not on circuit, many a counselor learned in the