The elder Colman decided on making the younger one a barrister; and
after visits to Scotland and Switzerland, the son returned to Soho
Square, and found that his father had taken for him chambers in the
Temple, and entered him as a student at Lincoln's Inn, where he
afterwards kept a few terms by eating oysters. Upon this Mr. Peake
notes:--"The students of Lincoln's Inn keep term by dining, or
pretending to dine, in the hall during the term time. Those who feed
there are accommodated with wooden trenchers instead of plates, and
previously to the dinner oysters are served up by way of prologue to the
play. Eating the oysters, or going into the hall without eating them, if
you please, and then departing to dine elsewhere, is quite sufficient
for term-keeping." The chambers in King's Bench Walk were furnished with
a tent-bedstead, two tables, half-a-dozen chairs, and a carpet as much
too scanty for the boards as Sheridan's "rivulet of rhyme" for its
"meadow of margin." To these the elder Colman added L10 worth of law
books which had been given to him in his own Lincoln's Inn days by Lord
Bath; then enjoining the son to work hard, the father left town upon a
party of pleasure.

Colman had sent his son to Switzerland to get him away from a certain
Miss Catherine Morris, an actress of the Haymarket company. This
answered for a time, but no sooner had the father left the son in the
Temple than he set off with Miss Morris to Gretna Green, and was there
married, in 1784; and four years after, the father's sanction having
been duly obtained, they were publicly married at Chelsea Church.

In the same staircase with Colman, in the Temple, lived the witty
Jekyll, who, seeing in Colman's chambers a round cage with a squirrel in
it, looked for a minute or two at the little animal, which was
performing the same operation as a man in the treadmill, and then
quietly said, "Ah, poor devil! he is going the Home Circuit;" the
locality where it was uttered--the Temple--favouring this technical
joke.

On the morning young Colman began his studies (December 20, 1784) he was
interrupted by the intelligence that the funeral procession of the great
Dr. Johnson was on its way from his late residence, Bolt Court, through
Fleet Street, to Westminster Abbey. Colman at once threw down his pen,
and ran forth to see the procession, but was disappointed to find it
much less splendid and imposing than the sepulchral pomp of Garrick five
years before