lls of the inns, or are closely associated in the minds of
students with the life of the law-colleges. Shakspeare's plays abound
with testimony that he was no stranger in the legal inns, and the rich
vein of legal lore and diction that runs through his writings has
induced more judicious critics than Lord Campbell to conjecture that he
may at some early time of his career have directed his mind to the
study, if not the practice, of the law. Amongst Elizabethan writers who
belonged to inns may be mentioned--George Ferrars, William Lambarde, Sir
Henry Spelman, and that luckless pamphleteer John Stubbs, all of whom
were members of Lincoln's Inn; Thomas Sackville, Francis Beaumont the
Younger, and John Ferne, of the Inner Temple; Walter Raleigh, of the
Middle Temple; Francis Bacon, Philip Sidney, George Gascoyne, and
Francis Davison, of Gray's Inn. Sir John Denham, the poet, became a
Lincoln's-Inn student in 1634; and Francis Quarles was a member of the
same learned society. John Selden entered the Inner Temple in the second
year of James I., where in due course he numbered, amongst his literary
contemporaries,--William Browne, Croke, Oulde, Thomas Gardiner, Dynne,
Edward Heywood, John Morgan, Augustus Caesar, Thomas Heygate, Thomas May,
dramatist and translator of Lucan's 'Pharsalia,' William Rough and Rymer
were members of Gray's Inn. Sir John David and Sir Simonds D'Ewes
belonged to the Middle Temple. Massinger's dearest friends lived in the
Inner Temple, of which society George Keate, the dramatist, and Butler's
staunch supporter William Longueville, were members. Milton passed the
most jocund hours of his life in Gray's Inn, in which college Cleveland
and the author of 'Hudibras' held the meetings of their club. Wycherley
and Congreve, Aubrey and Narcissus Luttrell were Inns-of-Court men. In
later periods we find Thomas Edwards, the critic; Murphy, the dramatic
writer; James Mackintosh, Francis Hargrave, Bentham, Curran, Canning, at
Lincoln's Inn. The poet Cowper was a barrister of the Temple. Amongst
other Templars of the eighteenth century, with whose names the
literature of their time is inseparably associated, were Henry Fielding,
Henry Brooke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke. Samuel Johnson resided
both in Gray's Inn and the Temple, and his friend Boswell was an
advocate of respectable ability as well as the best biographer on the
roll of English writers.

The foregoing are but a few taken from hundreds of names