the eventful day,
"and pray God it doth me more credit and good than hurt, by making
secret enemies _in faece Romuli_." His fears were in a slight degree
fulfilled. The Chiefs of the three Common Law Courts were greatly
displeased with an innovation which they had no wish to adopt; and their
warm expressions of dissatisfaction induced the Lord Keeper to cover his
disinterestedness with a harmless fiction. To pacify the indignant
Chiefs and the many persons who sympathized with them, he pretended that
though he had declined intentionally the gifts of the Chancery
barristers, he had not designed to exercise the same self-denial with
regard to the gifts of Chancery officers.[15]

The common law chiefs were slow to follow in the Lord Keeper's steps,
and many years passed before the reform, effected in Chancery by
accident or design, or by a lucky combination of both, was adopted in
the other great courts. In his memoir of Lord Cowper, Campbell observes:
"His example with respect to New Year's Gifts was not speedily followed;
and it is said that till very recently the Chief Justice of the Common
Pleas invited the officers of his court to a dinner at the beginning of
the year, when each of them deposited under his plate a present in the
shape of a Bank of England note, instead of a gift of oxen roaring at
his levee, as in ruder times." There is no need to remind the reader in
this place of the many veracious and the many apocryphal stories
concerning the basket justices of Fielding's time--stories showing that
in law courts of the lowest sort applicants for justice were accustomed
to fee the judges with victuals and drink until a comparatively recent
date.

Lucky would it have been for the first Earl of Macclesfield if the
custom of selling places in Chancery had been put an end to forever by
the Lord Keeper who abolished the custom of New Year's Gifts; but the
judge who at the sacrifice of one-fourth of his official income swept
away the pernicious usage which had from time immemorial marked the
opening of each year, saw no reason why he should purge Chancery of
another scarcely less objectionable practice. Following the steps of
their predecessors, the Chancellors Cowper, Harcourt, and Macclesfield
sold subordinate offices in their court; and whereas all previous
Chancellors had been held blameless for so doing, Lord Macclesfield was
punished with official degradation, fine, imprisonment, and obloquy.

By birth as humbl