leasant in Erskine's career occurred at his
Hampstead villa. Of Lord Kenyon's weekly trips from his mansion in
Lincoln's Inn Fields to his farm-house at Richmond notice has been taken
in a previous chapter. The memory of Charles Abbott's Hendon villa is
preserved in the name, style, and title of Lord Tenterden, of Hendon, in
the county of Middlesex. Indeed, lawyers have for many generations
manifested much fondness for fresh air; the impure atmosphere of their
courts in past time apparently whetting their appetites for wholesome
breezes.

Throughout the eighteenth century Lincoln's Inn Fields, an open though
disorderly spot, was a great place for the residence of legal magnates.
Somers, Nathan Wright, Cowper, Harcourt, successively inhabited Powis
House. Chief Justice Parker (subsequently Lord Chancellor Macclesfield)
lived there when he engaged Philip Yorke (then an attorney's articled
clerk, but afterwards Lord Chancellor of England) to be his son's law
tutor. On the south side of the square, Lord Chancellor Henley kept high
state in the family mansion that descended to him on the death of his
elder brother, and subsequently passed into the hands of the Surgeons,
whose modest but convenient college stands upon its site. Wedderburn and
Erskine had their mansions in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as well as their
suburban villas. And between the lawyers of the Restoration and the
judges of George III.'s reign, a large proportion of our most eminent
jurists and advocates lived in that square and the adjoining streets;
such as Queen Street on the west, Serle Street, Carey Street, Portugal
Street, Chancery Lane, on the south and south-east. The reader, let it
be observed, may not infer that this quarter was confined to legal
residents. The lawyers were the most conspicuous and influential
occupants; but they had for neighbors people of higher quality, who,
attracted to the square by its openness, or the convenience of its site,
or the proximity of the law colleges, made it their place of abode in
London. Such names as those of the Earl of Lindsey and the Earl of
Sandwich in the seventeenth, and of the Duke of Ancaster and the Duke of
Newcastle in the eighteenth century, establish the patrician character
of the quarter for many years. Moreover, from the books of popular
antiquaries, a long list might be made of wits, men of science, and
minor celebrities, who, though in no way personally connected with the
law, lived during the same