redress. Gadsden, the clerk, whom she had
warned not to eat any dumpling, as it was heavy (this was thought
suspicious), afterwards became a wealthy solicitor in Bedford Row.

CHAPTER VIII.

FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--_continued_).

Clifford's Inn--Dyer's Chambers--The Settlement after the Great
Fire--Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wives--Fetter Lane--Waller's Plot
and its Victims--Praise-God Barebone and his Doings--Charles Lamb at
School--Hobbes the Philosopher--A Strange Marriage--Mrs.
Brownrigge--Paul Whitehead--The Moravians--The Record Office and its
Treasures--Rival Poets.

Clifford's Inn, originally a town house of the Lords Clifford, ancestors
of the Earls of Cumberland, given to them by Edward II., was first let
to the students of law in the eighteenth year of King Edward III., at a
time when might was too often right, and hard knocks decided legal
questions oftener than deed or statute. Harrison the regicide was in
youth clerk to an attorney in Clifford's Inn, but when the Civil War
broke out he rode off and joined the Puritan troopers.

Clifford's Inn is the oldest Inn in Chancery. There was formerly, we
learn from Mr. Jay, an office there, out of which were issued writs,
called "Bills of Middlesex," the appointment of which office was in the
gift of the senior judge of the Queen's Bench. "But what made this Inn
once noted was that all the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court
(better known as the Palace Court) had their chambers there, as also had
the satellites, who paid so much per year for using their names and
looking at the nature of their practice. I should say that more misery
emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous
counties in England. The causes in this court were obliged to be tried
in the city of Westminster, near the Palace, and it was a melancholy
sight (except to lawyers) to observe in the court the crowd of every
description of persons suing one another. The most remarkable man in the
court was the extremely fat prothonotary, Mr. Hewlett, who sat under the
judge or the judge's deputy, with a wig on his head like a thrush's
nest, and with only one book before him, which was one of the volumes of
'Burns' Justice.' I knew a respectable gentleman (Mr. G. Dyer) who
resided here in chambers (where he died) over a firm of Marshalsea
attorneys. This gentleman, who wrote a history of Cambridge University
and a biography of Robin