son of Cambridge, had been a Bluecoat boy, went
as a Grecian to Cambridge, and, after the University, visited almost
every celebrated library in Europe. It often struck me what a mighty
difference there was between what was going on in the one set of
chambers and the other underneath. At Mr. Dyer's I have seen Sir Walter
Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, Talfourd, and many other celebrated
literati, 'all benefiting by hearing, which was but of little advantage
to the owner.' In the lawyers' chambers below were people wrangling,
swearing, and shouting, and some, too, even fighting, the only relief to
which was the eternal stamping of cognovits, bound in a book as large as
a family Bible." The Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord
Chelmsford both at one time practised in the County Court, purchased
their situations for large sums, and afterwards sold them. "It was not a
bad nursery for a young barrister, as he had an opportunity of
addressing a jury. There were only four counsel who had a right to
practise in this court, and if you took a first-rate advocate in there
specially, you were obliged to give briefs to two of the privileged
four. On the tombstone of one of the compensated Marshalsea attorneys is
cut the bitterly ironical epitaph, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for
they shall be called the children of God.""

Coke, that great luminary of English jurisprudence, resided at
Clifford's Inn for a year, and then entered himself at the Inner Temple.
Coke, it will be remembered, conducted the prosecution of both Essex and
Raleigh; in both cases he was grossly unfeeling to fallen great men.

The George Dyer mentioned by Mr. Jay was not the author of "The Fleece,"
but that eccentric and amiable old scholar sketched by Charles Lamb in
"The Essays of Elia." Dyer was a poet and an antiquary, and edited
nearly all the 140 volumes of the Delphin Classics for Valpy.
Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually
settled down in the monastic solitude of Clifford's Inn to compose
verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the
worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour
in Colebrooke Row into the New River, and was then fished out and
restored with brandy-and-water, Lamb was never tired of telling. At the
latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died in
1841.

The hall of Clifford's Inn is memorable as being the place where Sir
Matt