of the weighty accusation. In comparatively recent times there have not
been many eminent Englishmen to whom 'tradition's simple tongue' has
been more hostile than Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chief Justice, Popham. The
younger son of a gentle family, John Popham passed from Oxford to the
Middle Temple, raised himself to the honors of the ermine, secured the
admiration of illustrious contemporaries, in his latter years gained
abundant praise for wholesome severity towards footpads, and at his
death left behind him a name--which, tradition informs us, belonged to a
man who in his reckless youth, and even after his call to the bar, was a
cut-purse and highwayman. In mitigation of his conduct it is urged by
those who credit the charge, that young gentlemen of his date were so
much addicted to the lawless excitement of the road, that when he was
still a beardless stripling, an act (1 Ed. VI. c. 12, s. 14) was passed,
whereby any peer of the realm or lord of parliament, on a first
conviction for robbery, was entitled to benefit of clergy, though he
could not read. But bearing in mind the liberties which rumor is wont to
take with the names of eminent persons, the readiness the multitude
always display to attribute light morals to grave men, and the
infrequency of the cases where a dissolute youth is the prelude to a
manhood of strenuous industry and an old age of honor--the cautious
reader will require conclusive testimony before he accepts Popham's
connection with 'the road' as one of the unassailable facts of history.

The authority for this grave charge against a famous judge is John
Aubrey, the antiquary, who was born in 1627, just twenty years after
Popham's death. "For severall yeares," this collector says of the Chief
Justice, "he addicted himself but little to the studie of the lawes, but
profligate company, and was wont to take a purse with them. His wife
considered her and his condition, and at last prevailed with him to
lead another life and to stick to the studie of the lawe, which, upon
her importunity, he did, being then about thirtie yours old." As Popham
was born in 1531, he withdrew, according to this account, from the
company of gentle highwaymen about the year 1561--more than sixty years
before Aubrey's birth, and more than a hundred years before the
collector committed the scandalous story to writing. The worth of such
testimony is not great. Good stories are often fixed upon eminent men
who had no part in the