eer as soon as the arguments were closed.

When such men as Coke and Francis Bacon were the readers, the students
were entertained with lectures of surpassing excellence; but it was
seldom that such readers could be found. It seems also that at an early
period men became readers, not because they had any especial aptitude
for offices of instruction, or because they had some especial fund of
information--but simply because it was their turn to read. Routine
placed them in the pulpit for a certain number of weeks; and when they
had done all that routine required of them, and had thereby qualified
themselves for promotion to the rank of sergeant, they took their seats
amongst the benchers and ancients with the resolution not to trouble
themselves again about the intellectual progress of the boys.

Soon also the chief teacher of an Inn of Court became its chief feaster
and principal entertainer; and in like manner his subordinates in
office, such as assistant readers and readers elect, were required to
put their hands into their pockets, and feed their pupils with venison
and wine as well as with law and equity. It is amusing to observe how
little Dugdale has to say about the professional duties of readers--and
how much about their hospitable functions and responsibilities. Philip
and Mary ordered that no reader of the Middle Temple should give away
more than fifteen bucks during his readings; but so greatly did the cost
of readers' entertainments increase in the following century, that
Dugdale observes--"But the times are altered; there being few summer
readers who, in half the time that heretofore a reading was wont to
continue, spent so little as threescore bucks, besides red deer; some
have spent fourscore, some an hundred."

Just as readers were required to spend more in hospitality, they were
required to display less learning. Sound lawyers avoided election to the
readers' chairs, leaving them to be filled by rich men who could afford
to feast the nobility and gentry, or at least by men who were willing to
purchase social _eclat_ with a lavish outlay of money. Under Charles II.
the 'readings' were too often nothing better than scandalous exhibitions
of mental incapacity: and having sunk into disrepute, they died out
before the accession of James II.

The scandalous and beastly disorder of the Grand Day Feasts at the
Middle Temple, during Francis North's tenure of the reader's office, was
one of the causes that led