ful to the classes which supply the raw material of mobs, that the student feels no surprise when, on the outbreak of a riot, he sees the violence of the multitude directed against the entire body or particular members of the legal brotherhood. As he sneaked out of Bristol, beyond the reach of the infuriated rabble who yelled for his blood, Sir Charles Wetherell was but the last of a long line of lawyers who had been compelled to retreat, with more haste than dignity, before the madness of popular fury. Of one great jurist and advocate, more famous for legal knowledge than personal delicacy, who during the Reform agitation of '32 saved his neck by timely use of his feet, the story ran that he escaped from his pursuers under the disguise of a clean shirt.

When Lord George Gordon's indiscreet followers rose for the defense of our Protestant religion, they resolved to sweep away the lawyers, whilst they applied the besom of destruction to Romish priests. With this laudable intention they laid siege to the Temple, whither the barristers had congregated in strong force. Not only the barristers occupying chambers in the Temple, but non-resident members of both societies were assembled on King's Bench Walk, in the gardens, and in the avenues leading to the two principal gates. Householders in Lion Square and Ormond Street, in Bedford Row and Great Russell Street, left their windows to the rage of the rioters, and brought their wives, daughters, and plate-chests within the protection of their college walls.

In those days Lord Eldon was still a young man, living in Carey Street,' in a house that contained his business chambers as well as Mrs. Scott's drawing-room. This

His first London residence was in Cursitor Street, his habitation there being a little house opposite Sloman's sponging-house. Sloman's "-the sponging-house described in Mr. Disraeli's "Henrietta Temple" and Mr. Thackeray's "Vanity Fair "—was pulled down some eighteen months since.

was the period during which he in his old age believed himself to have endured cruel and humiliating povertythe period when he used to run into Clare Market and buy sixpennyworths of sprats for his wife's suppers. There is no need to say that if John Scott ever bought sprats, as he described in his later days, his conduct was not justified by narrow means; and that, instead of winning success after a hard struggle against adverse fortune, he commenced the practice of his profession with more than sufficient pecuniary means, and under advantageous circumstances. Instead of waiting through long years for an income, his fee-book told a flattering tale from the date of his first circuit. His friends in Northumberland and Durham sent him briefs as soon as he was called in February, 1776; in the following year he received two hundred pounds from one client; and at the time of his altogether imaginary distress, he was the luckiest member of the junior bar. In 1780, the year when his argument in Akroyd v. Smithson made him famous, and placed him in possession of a highly lucrative practice, he was well known in Chancery, to which court he already thought of confining himself; in the King's Bench, where he deemed himself ill-treated by Lord Mansfield, who was accused of showing favor to Westminster Oxford men; and on the Northern circuit, where in that same year he was appointed Solicitor General of the Grand Court established for the trial of barristers charged with mock offenses.

When the Gordon rioters filled London with alarm, no member of the junior bar was more prosperous and popular than handsome Jack Scott; and as he walked from his house in Carey Street to the Temple, with his wife on his arm, he returned the greetings of barristers who, besides liking him for a good fellow, thought it prudent to be on good terms with a man sure to achieve

eminence. Dilatory in his early as well as his later years, Scott left his house that morning half an hour too late. Already it was known to the mob that the Templars were assembling in their college; and a cry of "The Temple-Kill the lawyers!" had been raised in Whitefriars and Essex Street. Before they reached the Middle Temple gate, Mr. and Mrs. Scott were assaulted more than once. The man who won Bessie Surtees from a host of rivals, and carried her away against the will of her parents and the wishes of his own father, was able to protect her from serious violence. But before the beautiful creature was safe within the Temple, her dress was torn, and when at length she stood in the center of a crowd of excited and admiring barristers, her head was bare, and her ringlets fell loose upon her shoulders.

Long after the subjugation of the rioters, and when Lord George Gordon's madness had come to be regarded as a jest rather than an outrage, the Templars found pleasure in telling how bravely they fought, or rather how bravely they would have fought, if they had been allowed to have their own way. Of the good stories concerning their valor, many of them are too good to be true, and some too true to be good.

Judge Burrough used to tell that, when the Gordon rioters besieged the Temple, he and a strong body of barristers, headed by a sergeant of the guards, were stationed in the Inner Temple Lane; and that, having complete confidence in the strength of their massive gate, they spoke bravely of their desire to be fighting on the other side. At length the gate was forced. The lawyers fell into confusion, and were about to beat a retreat, when the sergeant, a man of infinite humor, cried out in a magnificent voice, "Take care no gentleman fires from behind." The words struck awe into the hearts of the assailants, and caused the barristers to

laugh. The mob, who had expected neither laughter nor armed resistance, took to flight, telling all whom they met that the bloody-minded lawyers were armed to the teeth, and enjoying themselves. The Temple was saved.

The most exquisitely comical version of the incident to which Judge Burrough's narrative points, came from Lord Erskine's lips in November, 1819; when in the House of Lords, speaking upon Lord Lansdowne's motion for an inquiry into the state of the country, he condemned the conduct of the yeomanry at the "Manchester Massacre." By an ordinary display of spirit and resolution," observed the brilliant egotist to his brother peers, who were so impressed by his complacent volubility and good-humored self-esteem, that they were for the moment ready to take him at his own valuation, "insurrection may be repressed without violating the law or the constitution. In the riots of 1780, when the mob were preparing to attack the house of Lord Mans field, I offered to defend it with a small military force; but this offer was unluckily rejected; and afterwards, being in the Temple when the rioters were preparing to force the gate, and had fired several times, I went to the gate, opened it, and showed them a field-piece which I was prepared to discharge in case the attack was persisted in. They were daunted, fell back, and dispersed." This is a good specimen of the vain-glorious statements which Erskine frequently made under the influence of egotism, high spirits, and lawless fancy. Walter Scott had some reason for his sweeping judgment—" Tom Erskine was positively mad!"

Lord Mansfield had reason to think the Gordon rioters less manageable than Lord Erskine, after a lapse of almost forty years, supposed them to have been. An enlightened champion of religious liberty, who in parlia

ment raised his voice for the Catholics, and even on the bench shielded an unfortunate member of the Roman Church from the injustice of the law, this great Chief Justice was an object of especial abhorrence to the miserable fanatics who styled themselves "The General Protestant Association." On Friday, June 2, when the sixty thousand rioters, headed by a half-witted nobleman, marched from St. George's Fields, over London Bridge, and through the City to Westminster, Lord Mansfield was one of the peers who were subjected to brutal insult on their way to the House of Parliament. As his carriage passed down Parliament Street he was received with yells, and the windows of the coach were broken with stones. Before the servants of the House of Lords. succeeded in rescuing him from the rabble, he had been subjected to such personal violence that on taking his seat on the woolsack, as Lord Thurlow's substitute, he showed marks of indignity in his torn robes and disordered wig. When the day of national disgrace had closed, he drove from Westminster to his house without again encountering the defenders of our reformed religion.

But the mob resolved to wreak their vengeance upon him in a more signal manner. Hatred of the judge who was unanimously allowed to be the most accomplished and learned lawyer of his time, was one of the motives that inspired them to besiege the Temple, in the hope of destroying the whole accursed tribe of which he was a conspicuous chief. To sack the Temple was beyond their power, but they were able to burn the Chief Justice's house in the north-east corner of Bloomsbury Square. On the night of June 6, when the riot had been permitted to rage for four or five days, a dense mass of insurgents surrounded the mansion, and speedily accomplished the work of destruction. The attack had been