compelled to muster the barbarous Law-French; but the books which he was
required to read were few in comparison with those of a modern
Inns-of-Court man. Roger North mentions between twenty and thirty
authors, which the student should read in addition to Year-Books and
more recent reports; and it is clear that the man who knew with any
degree of familiarity such a body of legal literature was a very erudite
lawyer two hundred years since. But the student was advised to read this
small library again and again, "common-placing" the contents of its
volumes, and also "common-placing" all new legal facts. The utility and
convenience of common-place books were more apparent two centuries
since, than in our time, when books of reference are always published
with good tables of contents and alphabetical indexes. Roger North held
that no man could become a good lawyer who did not keep a common-place
book. He instructs the student to buy for a common-place register "a
good large paper book, as big as a church bible;" he instructs him how
to classify the facts which should be entered in the work; and for a
model of a lucid and thoroughly lawyer-like common-place book he refers
"to Lincoln's Inn library, where the Lord Hale's common-place book is
conserved, and that may be a pattern, _instar omnium_."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PUPILS IN CHAMBERS.

But the most important part of an industrious law-student's labors in
olden time, was the work of watching the practice of Westminster Hall.
In the seventeenth century, the constant succession of political trials
made the King's Bench Court especially attractive to students who were
more eager for gossip than advancement of learning; but it was always
held that the student, who was desirous to learn the law rather than to
catch exciting news or hear exciting speeches, ought to frequent the
Common Pleas, in which court the common law was said to be at home. At
the Common Pleas, a student might find a seat vacant in the students'
benches so late as ten o'clock; but it was not unusual for every place
devoted to the accommodation of students in the Court of King's Bench,
to be occupied by six o'clock, A.M. By dawn, and even before the sun had
begun to break, students bent on getting good seats at the hearing of an
important cause would assemble, and patiently wait in court till the
judges made their appearance.

One prominent feature in the advocate's education must always be
elocutio