sent him to Gray's Inn that he might study law.
Here the elegance of his handwriting gained him a rapid repute; his
skill became the envy of all the lean-souled clerks in the Inn, and he
might have died a respectable attorney had not the instinct of sport
forced him from the inkpot and parchment of his profession. Ill could
he tolerate the monotony and restraint of this clerkly life. In his eyes
law was an instrument, not of justice, but of jugglery. Men were born,
said his philosophy, rather to risk their necks than ink their fingers;
and if a bold adventure puts you in a difficulty, why, then, you hire
some straw-splitting attorney to show his cunning. Indeed, the study of
law was for him, as it was for Falstaff, an excuse for many a bout and
merry-making. He loved his glass, and he loved his wench, and he loved
a bull-baiting better than either. It was his boast, and Moll Cutpurse's
compliment, that he never missed a match in his life, and assuredly no
man was better known in Paris Garden than the intrepid Ralph Briscoe.

The cloistered seclusion of Gray's Inn grew daily more irksome. There
he would sit, in mute despair, drumming the table with his fingers,
and biting the quill, whose use he so bitterly contemned. Of winter
afternoons he would stare through the leaded window-panes at the
gaunt, leafless trees, on whose summits swayed the cawing rooks,
until servitude seemed intolerable, and he prayed for the voice of the
bearward that summoned him to Southwark. And when the chained bear,
the familiar monkey on his back, followed the shrill bagpipe along the
curious street, Briscoe felt that blood, not ink, coursed in his veins,
forgot the tiresome impediment of the law, and joined the throng, hungry
for this sport of kings. Nor was he the patron of an enterprise wherein
he dared take no part. He was as bold and venturesome as the bravest
ruffler that ever backed a dog at a baiting. When the bull, cruelly
secured behind, met the onslaught of his opponents, throwing them off,
now this side, now that, with his horns, Briscoe, lost in excitement,
would leap into the ring that not a point of the combat should escape
him.

So it was that he won the friendship of his illustrious benefactress,
Moll Cutpurse. For, one day, when he had ventured too near the maddened
bull, the brute made a heave at his breeches, which instantly gave way;
and in another moment he would have been gored to death, had not Moll
seized him by the co