without acquiring a capacity of making a solitary life agreeable, no man could pretend to success in the law, applying to himself the lesson that the London citizens used to their apprentices, " Keep your shop, and your shop will keep you." He would neither attend dancing nor fencing schools, notwithstand ing " the pretended advantages that the fe male faction propose from those assemblies." Francis used to attend " the commons constantly in the hall (at the Temple) at noons and nights, and fell into the way of putting cases (as they call it) which much improved him. He used to say that no man could be a good lawyer that was not a putcase." 1 In reading the law reports much absti nence was practised. There were about fifty volumes of reports at that time, but they are declared to be " almost innumerable." But it is truly said by Roger that "to spend weeks and months wholly in reading them is like horses in a string before a loaded wagon." It was well, as he urges, to "mix some institutionary reading with them, as after a fulness of the reports in the morning about noon to take a repast in Stamford, Crompton, or the Lord Coke's Pleas of the Crown, and also to look over some of the antiqua rian books, as Britton, Bracton, Fleta," etc. There was no Blackstone then to give the student a systematic outline of his work. More stress was then laid upon "dis course " than anything else. Francis North would talk over the law with his friends at commons or over a chop, quoting from the Earl of Nottingham that one " should study all the morning and talk all the afternoon, because a ready speech (if it be not Nature's gift) is acquirable only by practice, and is very necessary for a bar 1 The practice of one lawyer putting supposed cases to another for solution goes far back in the law. It appears to have often taken place in walking. So bad a man as Scroggs was noted as a put-case. North says that he had seen him for hours together before the courts sat, stand at the bar with an audience of students over against him, putting of cases and debating so as suited their capacities and encouraged their industry.

practicer." It is said in this connection, that after the fire 1 of the Inner Temple which destroyed the old cloisters, it was considered, by the authorities in charge, whether they should be rebuilt or not; and their recon struction was urged by Mr. Attorney Finch, on the ground that the students should have a place to walk in in the evenings and put cases, and it was so ordered. The utterance of old Sergeant Maynard, the best book lawyer of his time, is quoted, that the law is "ars bablativa." So searching was this jur ist in his studies, that when he travelled in his later years he took with him one of the old year books to divert him on his journey, and said he chose it before any comedy. At this point, our author most truly remarks, "a true notion of the use of anything, how ever out of the road of common approbation, will administer such a superlative taste " as this. The next stage in education was to attend the courts, not merely in such causes as one might chance to have, but for the purpose of training. While Francis North intended in the end to join the King's Bench bar, he attended, for the purpose of learning plead ings, etc., in the Common Pleas, since the time of that court was not then taken up with factious contentions as at the King's Bench, " where more news than law is stirring." The final step in education was an attend ance upon the " moots " in the Middle Temple, which were then carefully per formed, but in our author's time had fallen into disuse. Upon this decay he remarks : "It is hard to give a good reason (bad ones are prompt enough) why they are not well attended now." So eager was North in the pursuit of his profession that he sought to manage cases 1 It is said that some of the gentlemen of the Inner Temple would not endeavor, at the fire, to preserve the goods that were in the lodgings of absent persons, because, as they said, it was against the law to break up any man's chamber (Clarendon's Life, p. 347). This is a signal in stance of the enormous tenacity of red tape in the prac tice of the common law.