ned it. Describing the state of
the inns some two generations later, Blackstone computed the number of
law-students at about a thousand, perhaps slightly more; and he observes
that in his time the merely _nominal_ law-students were comparatively
few. "Wherefore," he says, "few gentlemen now resort to the Inns of
Court, but such for whom the knowledge of practice is absolutely
necessary; such, I mean, as are intended for the profession; the rest of
our gentry, (not to say our nobility also) having usually retired to
their estates, or visited foreign kingdoms, or entered upon public life,
without any instruction in the laws of the land, and indeed with hardly
any opportunity of gaining instruction, unless it can be afforded to
them in the universities."

The folly of those who lamented that men of plebeian rank were allowed
to adopt the legal profession as a means of livelihood, was however
exceeded by the folly of men of another sort, who endeavored to hide the
humble extractions of eminent lawyers, under the ingenious falsehoods of
fictitious pedigrees. In the last century, no sooner had a lawyer of
humble birth risen to distinction, than he was pestered by fabricators
of false genealogies, who implored him to accept their silly romances
about his ancestry. In most cases, these ridiculous applicants hoped to
receive money for their dishonest representations; but not seldom it
happened that they were actuated by a sincere desire to protect the
heraldic honor of the law from the aspersions of those who maintained
that a man might fight his way to the woolsack, although his father had
been a tender of swine. Sometimes these imaginative chroniclers, not
content with fabricating a genealogical chart for a _parvenu_ Lord
Chancellor, insisted that he should permit them to write their lives in
such a fashion, that their earlier experiences should seem to be in
harmony with their later fortunes. Lord Macclesfield (the son of a poor
and ill-descended country attorney), was traced by officious adulators
to Reginald Le Parker, who accompanied Edward I., while Prince of Wales,
to the Holy Land. In like manner a manufacturer of genealogies traced
Lord Eldon to Sir Michael Scott of Balwearie. When one of this servile
school of worshippers approached Lord Thurlow with an assurance that he
was of kin with Cromwell's secretary Thurloe, the Chancellor, with bluff
honesty, responded, "Sir, as Mr. Secretary Thurloe was, like myself, a
Suffo