xpensive and modish habits spent
large sums.

In the days of James I., when standing bands were still the fashion, and
falling-bands had not come in, the Inns of Court men were very
particular about the stiffness, cut, and texture of their collars.
Speaking of the Inns of Court men, Sir Thomas Overbury, (who was
poisoned in 1613), says: "He laughs at every man whose band sits not
well, or that hath not a fair shoe-type, and is ashamed to be in any
man's company who wears not his cloathes well."

If portraits may be trusted, the falling-band of Charles I.'s time, bore
considerable resemblance to the falling neck-frill, which twenty years
since was very generally worn by quite little boys, and is still sometimes
seen on urchins who are about six years of age. The bands worn by the
barristers and clergy of our own time are modifications of this antique
falling-band, and like the coif cap of the modern sergeant, they bear
only a faint likeness to their originals. But though bands--longer than
those still worn by clergymen--have come to be a distinctive feature of
legal costume, the bar was slow to adopt falling-collars--regarding them
as a strange and fanciful innovation. Whitelock's personal narrative
furnishes pleasant testimony that the younger gentry of Charles I.'s
England adopted the new collar before the working lawyers.

"At the Quarter-Sessions of Oxford," says Whitelock, speaking of the
year 1635, when he was only thirty years of age, "I was put into the
chair in court, though I was in colored clothes, a sword by my side, and
a falling-band, which was unusual for lawyers in those days, and in this
garb I gave the charge to the Grand Jury. I took occasion to enlarge on
the point of jurisdiction in the temporal courts in matters
ecclesiastical, and the antiquity thereof, which I did the rather
because the spiritual men began in those days to swell higher than
ordinary, and to take it as an injury to the Church that anything
savoring of the spirituality, should be within the cognisance of
ignorant laymen. The gentlemen and freeholders seemed well pleased with
my charge, and the management of the business of the sessions; and said
they perceived one might speak as good sense in a falling-band as in a
ruff." At this time Whitelock had been about seven years at the bar; but
at the Quarter-Sessions the young Templar was playing the part of
country squire, and as his words show, he was dressed in a fashion that
directl