Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/493

 456

TEMPLE STUDENTS AND TEMPLE STUDIES. By Dennis W. Douthwaite. II.

THE dawn of the seventeenth century was the hey-day of the Temple. The members still retained much of their old attitude to the rest of the world; but inside they began to develop a clanship and a fashion of their own — the Benchers, as it seems, fostering every movement towards singularity of dress, mien and habit. The student delighted to wear his rue with a difference. He donned "sad-colored cloth ing" and eschewed "all flowered cloakes," the more readily because, outside, the poet was singing the splendors of a dress as rich and rare as Howard's luckless "A vest as admired Vortiger had on Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won,"

— the earliest version known to us of the action of " taking the breeks off a High lander." In the same spirit of contradiction he consented to be clean shaved, because, around him, all other gallants went bearded like the pard. So, in the reign of Henry VIII., he had been forbiddento play shovegrote or. slyp-grote within the Temple walls on pain of 6s. and 8</., — more because shove-grote was then the play of the com moner sort than because of any fear of its demoralizing influence. Indeed, for many years afterwards, the Temple was a hot-bed of what the unlearned call games of chance and gambling, the usual finish to the Read ers' feasts. Some of the old dice were found, not many years since, beneath the Temple floor, and, unless tradition errs, the majority were cogged. The uprising of this new spirit, though it was a good deal laughed at, was not without its uses to the Inns. It was a great Free masonry which threw whatever influence it possessed behind its champions and spokes men, and may have made no little difference

to the outcome of its struggles on behalf of the Common Law. "The Court desires to stand well with the Templars in these times of commotion," says one writer; and it would be hard to gauge the worth of the support which his enthusiastic backers may have given to Coke in his duel with the King. If Sir John Rigby was called on to deliver an awkward opinion on Parliamentary Right, we doubt if— quite apart from the question of Sir John's parliamentary reputa tion — he would find the same blind loyalty to back him. In these piping times of peace, when the Common Law runs no dangers, and all the tendencies are towards the increasing of the people's privileges (in cluding litigation), the barrister can afford to relax his discipline and unbend. It will be remembered of Mr. Pell's Lord Chancellor that, in expressing his opinion of no less able a lawyer than Mr. Pell him self, he claimed the right to " d—n hisself — in confidence." That, if the flippancy may be pardoned, is, with a trifling and obvious transference, exactly the attitude of the modern bar. Nor, we suppose, is there any great need of something more. The Bar Committee is perhaps right in being content to exist without, like the Greek philosopher, asking for a reason. "Govern me, if you please," said Lord Bramwell, "as little as possible." Lord Bramwell was, or should have been, a mem ber of the Bar Committee. Not only would he have much enlivened it proceedings, but he might have ensured the continuance of a policy which, we fear, there is at present some danger of its abandoning — to forget, in the turmoil of legislation, old methods, like Maud, " Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null."