time would have the bad
taste or foolish hardihood to express openly his regret that the members
of a liberal profession should no longer pay a hurtful attention to
illiberal distinctions.

According to Fortescue, the law-students belonging at the same time to
the Inns of Court and Chancery numbered _at least_ one thousand eight
hundred in the fifteenth century; and it may be fairly inferred from his
words that their number considerably exceeded two thousand. To each of
the ten Inns of Chancery the author of the 'De Laudibus' assigns "an
hundred students at the least, and to some of them a much greater
number;" and he says that the least populous of the four Inns of Court
contained "two hundred students or thereabouts." At the present time the
number of barristers--together with Fellows of the College of Advocates,
and certificated special pleaders and conveyancers not at the bar--is
shown by the Law List for 1866 to be somewhat more than 4800.[27] Even
when it is borne in mind how much the legal business of the whole nation
has necessarily increased with the growth of our commercial
prosperity--it being at the same time remembered, upon the other hand,
how many times the population of the country has doubled itself since
the wars of the Roses--few persons will be of opinion that the legal
profession, either by the number of its practitioners or its command of
employment, is a more conspicuous and prosperous power at the present
time than it was in the fifteenth century.

Ferne was by no means the only gentleman of Elizabethan London to
deplore the rapid increase in the number of lawyers, and to regret the
growing liberality which encouraged--or rather the national prosperity
which enabled--men of inferior parentage to adopt the law as a
profession. In his address on Mr. Clerke's elevation to the dignity of a
sergeant, Lord Chancellor Hatton, echoing the common complaint
concerning the degradation of the law through the swarms of plebeian
students and practitioners, observed--"Let not the dignitie of the lawe
be geven to men unmeete. And I do exhorte you all that are heare present
not to call men to the barre or the benches that are so unmeete. I finde
that there are now more at the barre in one house than there was in all
the Innes of Court when I was a younge man." Notwithstanding the
Chancellor's earnest statement of his personal recollection of the state
of things when he was a young man, there is reason to think t