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He fetches money out of his throat like a juggler; and as the rabble in the country value gentlemen by their housekeeping and their eating, so is he supposed to have so much law as he has kept commons, and the abler to deal with clients by how much the more he has devoured of Inns-of-Court mutton; and it matters not whether he keep his study so he has but kept commons.
As the town grew in extent and population, the social influence of the university gradually decreased; but in Elizabethan London the éclat of the inns was at its brightest, and during the reigns of Elizabeth's two nearest successors London submitted to the Inns-of-Court men as arbiters of all matters pertaining to taste copying their dress, slang, amusements, and vices.
Nay, further, it is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride, and dissimulation, and bribery at Whitehall. You may expose rapine and injustice in the Inns-of-Court chapel, and in a City pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy, and extortion.
For several generations, and for two centuries after Sir John Fortescue wrote the 'De Laudibus, the Inns-of-Court man was more busied in learning to sing than in learning to argue a law cause, more desirous to fence with a sword than to fence with logic.
At that period, the division between the two branches of the profession was much less wide than it subsequently became; and no rule or maxim of professional etiquette forbade Inns-of-Court men to act as the subordinates of attorneys and solicitors. Chapman, a solicitor, whose place of business was in Lincoln's Inn.
If he have spirit or wit he may light of better company, and may learn some flashes of wit, which may do him knight's service in the country hereafter. But he is now gone to the inns-of-court, where he studies to forget what he learned before, his acquaintance and the fashion. Is a child at man's estate, one whom nature huddled up in haste, and left his best part unfinished.
This general employment of servants who were common to several masters would alone prove that the Inns-of-Court men in the seventeenth century felt it convenient to husband their resources, and exercise economy.
By his means the law makes more knaves than it hangs, and, like the Inns-of-Court, protects offenders against itself. He gets within the law and disarms it. His hardest labour is to wriggle himself into trust, which if he can but compass his business is done, for fraud and treachery follow as easily as a thread does a needle.
The pecuniary means of Inns-of-Court students have not varied much throughout the last twelve generations.
This serves him for wit; for when he meets with any of his foreign acquaintances, all they smatter passes for wit, and they applaud one another accordingly. He believes this raggedness of his discourse a great demonstration of the improvement of his knowledge, as Inns-of-Court men intimate their proficiency in the law by the tatters of their gowns.
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