benchers do likewise declare their opinions as how they take the law to be in these questions.

"The Manner of Mooting in the Inns of Chancery.] -In the learning vacations each utter barrister, that is a reader in the inns of chancery, goes with two students of the same inn of court to the inn of chancery, where he is appointed to read; and there meet him commonly two of each of the inns of court, who sitting as the benchers do in the inns of court at their moots, they argue and hear the case.

"In the term-time the only exercises of learning are arguing and debating cases after dinner, and mooting after supper, in the same manner as in the vacations.

"The time between the learning vacations and terms is called the mean vacation; during which time, every day after dinner, cases are argued as at other times; and after supper moots are brought in, and pleaded by the inner barristers, in the presence of the utter barristers, which sit there in the room of the benchers, and argued by them as the benchers do in term-time and learning vacations.

"Note, That in the four inns of court before mentioned, there are reckoned to be about 300 students, besides the utter barristers and inner barristers.

"During the time of reading, which heretofore continued three weeks and three days, the reader keeps a constant and splendid table; feasting the nobility, judges, bishops, principal officers of state, the chief gentry, and sometimes the king himself; inso.. much that it hath cost a reader above 1000/..

"Afterwards, he that hath been reader wears a long robe, differing from other barristers, and is then in a capacity to be made a serjeant at law.

"Now all these inns of court and chancery are not far distant from one another, and do make the most famous profession of the law that is in the world: there being so many eminent persons of such sound judgment in the knowledge of the law, and a considerable number of them the sons of gentlemen and persons of quality."

These mootings or disputations in the inns of court and chancery have been long since disused. Danby Pickering, esq. of Gray's Inn, was the last who voluntarily resumed them; but they were of no continuance, and, at the present day, so much has the course of legal education changed, that scarcely any of the ancient customs mentioned by Stowe and the preceding authors, are known, except as matters of curiosity, in which light they will be treated of in the following pages. It may be worth a question, however, before we close this chapter (though the grand Christmassings and other romantic festivals might be dispensed with), whether the total rejection of every restraint in professed seminaries of instruction is an improvement or a disadvantage? There are certainly many objections to the mode of education now in use for attaining the knowledge of a science so difficult and complicate as the law, the abstruser parts of which are rarely to be acquired in an attorney's office, in copying precedents and at

The

tending the common routine of business'. subject is of importance, and merits consideration.

'Some of the following hints, on legal education, which appeared in a letter addressed to the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, strike us as judicious and pertinent.

"The first point I shall take into consideration is the utility of attending a special pleader's office, and with what previous preparation such an attendance might be with advantage to the pupil. He must be a person of extraordinary industry and application who can derive much information in such an office, with the total legal ignorance with which nine out of ten of those that enter one are generally possessed. And it is a matter of astonishment how so many have made it a step to profit and honours, when we consider the situation of a young man who is placed there. A raw youth, from school or college, is sent to a special pleader's for three or four years, where, for a premium of one hundred guineas per annum, he is allowed a seat at a desk, with the privilege of copying special pleadings, or leaving them alone: the latter he is naturally enough inclined to do; and when we add to this propensity the dryness of the employment, a want of all previous knowledge of the subject, and of a person to instruct him in the nature and grounds of this extremely difficult science (for a special pleader of eminence, and consequently in great business, cannot be supposed to have sufficient leisure to direct the studies and pursuits of his pupils), and a total want of all control or authority, can we be surprised at seeing the box lobby, the opera, Bond Street, and every place of public entertainment continually haunted with law students, there wasting in idle, if not pernicious pleasures, those precious hours, which devoted to study and the pursuits of their profession, intermixed with instruction and wholesome recreation, might gain them the well-earned approbation of their own consciences, and the esteem and confidence of their fellow-citizens? Should there happen to be several pupils in the same office, as is frequently the case, even the labour of copying (uninstructive and barren as it is) is at a stand, and the comparative merits of a Parisot and a Hilligsberg, a Banti and a Mara, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and the dashing operations of the approaching Sunday, supersede all employment, as well as every topic of rational conversation.

CHAP. II.

1

THE INNER TEMPLE.

THE Temple is well known to have taken its name from that gallant religious military order, the knights templars, who came into England in the reign of

"The course of study therefore, that strikes me as the most eligible to attain the qualifications necessary for the profession of a barrister, and the most likely to render the path of legal knowledge less thorny and laborious; nay, even strew some flowers in that barren and inauspicious road; but which I with diffidence submit to the consideration of wiser men than myself in the science of education; and which, as in almost direct opposition to the dictum of the immortal Blackstone (whom no student but must revere, and who is above all gratitude, as he is above all praise), cannot but be advanced with all that hesitation and embarrassment which a scholar must feel in combatting his master's favourite proposition: this course then would be, after having given my pupil the usual education that a good grammar-school affords, and made him complete master of the French and Latin languages, in the intervals of which study, and as an assistance to it, an arrangement of such law maxims as have any pretence to purity of diction, and other books of that nature, might be put into his hands, to bring him acquainted with some of the leading features of the law, and enable him to read with greater pleasure and improvement Blackstone's Commentaries, which is one of the very first books that should be put into his hands. Having thus given him some insight into the nature of the law, I must confess I do not think any step more proper to be taken, either with a view of increasing his stock of knowledge, or as calculated to give him a proper idea, accompanied with habits of business, than to place him at sixteen years of age in the office of an attorney of general

*For instance, a very useful little book of the kind, called Principia Legis et Equitatis, by Thomas Branch, esq. 12mo. 1753.