an, or Kate, or Olive, entered his room radiant with
smiles, delicate in attire, and musical with gleesome gossip about
country neighbors, and the life of a joyous home?

Seldom does a Templar of the present generation receive so fair and
innocent a visitor. To him the presence of a gentlewoman in his court,
is an occasion for ingenious conjecture; encountered on his staircase
she is a cause of lively astonishment. His guests are men, more or less
addicted to tobacco; his business callers are solicitors and their
clerks; in his vestibule the masculine emissaries of tradesmen may
sometimes be found--head-waiters from neighboring taverns, pot-boys from
the 'Cock' and the 'Rainbow.' A printer's devil may from time to time
knock at his door. But of women--such women as he would care to mention
to his mother and sisters--he sees literally nothing in his dusty,
ill-ordered, but not comfortless rooms. He has a laundress, one of a
class on whom contemporary satire has been rather too severe.

Feminine life of another sort lurks in the hidden places of the law
colleges, shunning the gaze of strangers by daylight; and even when it
creeps about under cover of night, trembling with a sense of its own
incurable shame. But of this sad life, the bare thought of which sends a
shivering through the frame of every man whom God has blessed with a
peaceful home and wholesome associations, nothing shall be said in this
page.

In past time the life of law-colleges was very different in this
respect. When they ceased to be ecclesiastics, and fixed themselves in
the hospices which soon after the reception of the gowned tenants, were
styled Inns of Courts; our lawyers took unto themselves wives, who were
both fair and discreet. And having so made women flesh of their flesh
and bone of their bone, they brought them to homes within the immediate
vicinity of their collegiate walls, and sometimes within the walls
themselves. Those who would appreciate the life of the Inns in past
centuries, and indeed in times within the memory of living men, should
bear this in mind. When he was not on circuit, many a counsellor learned
in the law, found the pleasures not less than the business of his
existence within the bounds of his 'honorable society.' In the fullest
sense of the words, he took his ease in his Inn; besides being his
workshop, where clients flocked to him for advice, it was his club, his
place of pastime, and the shrine of his domestic affect