sat in judgment, as Tooke expressed it in his
defence, "on the representative eligibility of an
old priest." A committee having been
appointed to search for precedents, they reported
that a cleric was neither a knight, a citizen, nor a
burgess; and "that no person who either is or
has been in priest's orders, or held any office in
the Church, can possibly be a member of the
House of Commons." Horne Tooke, in resisting
the bill brought in for his exclusion, urged
that the maxim "once a captain always a captain,"
ought not to be extended to him. And to
the objection that a clergyman had the cure of
souls to attend to, he replied by assuring the
House that he had no person's soul to take care of
but his own. His powerful reasoning and
ridicule on the occasion, did not avail; the bill
passed the House of Commons, but was fiercely
opposed in the House of Lords by Lord Thurlow,
the ex-Chancellor, who, as Attorney-General, had
prosecuted Tooke for libel. He denounced the
measure as vindictive, declared that it was
undignified to legislate against a single individual,
and warned the right reverend bench that the
principle might one day exclude them from
parliament. Tooke was permitted to retain his seat
for the remainder of the session, but the act for
his exclusion became law.

The next most serious contention in which the
benchers were involved, was with the members of
the press. A very high tone prevailed in parliament,
even in the early part of the present century,
against permitting the publication of the
debates. Mr. Wyndham, then a leading member,
who has been designated by Lord Macaulay "the
first gentleman of his age," declared "that if
this practice had been tolerated, winked at, and
suffered, it was no reason that persons should
make a trade of what they obtained from the
galleries." He "did not know any of the
conductors of the press, but he understood them to
be a set of men who would give in to the corrupt
misrepresentations of opposite sides." Opinions
so opposed to our present notions, were quite
congenial to the tendencies of the benchers
of Lincoln's Inn, who in 1807 passed a most
arbitrary general order, that they would
exclude any applicant for admission who had
ever received payment for any publication or
report in a newspaper. The other inns having
been requested to adopt a similar regulation,
they, to their honour, refused. This attempt
to proscribe a class then becoming highly influential,
aroused indignation, and became the subject
of very animated discussions in parliament, on a
petition presented by Mr. Farquarson, who had
been a reporter for the press, and against whose
admission to the bar it was sought to enforce this
obnoxious proscription. Mr. James Stephens,
then a member of the House of Commons, who
had raised himself to the bar by being a reporter,
and who afterwards became a master in chancery,
manfully maintained the rank and privileges of the
press. Sheridan introduced an interesting anecdote
of Dr. Johnson, illustrative of the value of
paid authorships even to the highest parliamentary
renown. Two celebrated published speeches
of the great Lord Chatham, in the House of Lords,
had been compared to orations of Demosthenes
and Cicero, and, a question having been raised
which resembled the Greek and which the Roman
orator, it was agreed to refer the determination
to the great arbiter of literature. His answer
was, "I cannot decide that point; but this I well
remember, that I wrote them both" It was in
the end conceded that the regulation attempted
by the benchers was wholly indefensible; and it
was admitted that this illiberal edict was framed
at the suggestion of eight practising barristers,
suddenly after dinner, when the benchers were
flushed with wine. The order was of course
revoked, and it is to be regretted that the
secret post prandial deliberations of the benchers
"upon honour," did not terminate with that
revocation.

The legal profession in France, as well as in
England, is divided into two branches—the
avocat or barrister, and the avoué or solicitor.
In the University of Paris there exists a faculty
of law as well as of medicine, and the president
and council of that department admit to the bar.
There are different degrees conferred by the
faculty: those of Bachelor Licentiate and Doctor
of Law. The discipline of the Roman law passed
into Gaul with the conquerors; and the capitularies
of Charlemagne, in the year 802, first mention
the profession of an advocate. "With a
recognised antiquity, far more remote than that of
the barrister in England, the present very
complete organisation of the Trench Bar comprises
and preserves all the rights, duties, and obligations
of advocates, derived and adopted from its
earliest traditions. In the progressive advance of
law reform in England, it is not impossible that
the inns may be consolidated into a legal university,
endowed with the faculty of conferring
degrees, and reserving both to students and
members of the bar the right of public appeal to
the superior courts. We trust that whatever
necessary and liberal changes be made in the
powers and doings of the Inns of Court—where
liberal changes akin to the spirit of the times are
sorely needed—the individuality of the inns may
so far remain unaltered as that their halls and
cloisters will be religiously preserved. In those
cloisters repose the remains of men who have
adorned and enriched the literature of their
country, and have graced and dignified the bar,
the bench, and the senate. A monument in
Westminster Abbey, with an immortal epitaph,
from the pen of Johnson, records of Oliver
Goldsmith—poet, naturalist, historian—that he left
no kind of writing untouched, and that he
touched nothing he did not adorn. A plain
white marble tablet placed in their church by
the benchers of the Inner Temple, sixty-one
years after the erection of that monument, attests
that "a very great man"—we again adopt the
affectionate words of Johnson—who had never
been a law student or member of the bar, died