s. On one
occasion, returning to his chambers after 'drinking champagne with the
wits,' he found the duchess's carriage and attendants on King's Bench
Walk. A numerous crowd of footmen and link-bearers surrounded the coach,
and when the barrister entered his chambers he encountered the mistress
of that army of lackeys. 'Young man,' exclaimed the grand lady, eyeing
the future Lord Mansfield with a look of displeasure, 'if you mean to
rise in the world, you must not sup out.' On a subsequent night Sarah of
Marlborough called without appointment at the chambers, and waited till
past midnight in the hope that she would see the lawyer ere she went to
bed. But Murray, being at an unusually late supper-party, did not return
till her grace had departed in an overpowering rage. 'I could not make
out, sir, who she was,' said Murray's clerk, describing her grace's
appearance and manner, 'for she would not tell me her name; _but she
swore so dreadfully that I am sure she must be a lady of quality_.'"

Charles Lamb, who was born in Crown Office Row, in his exquisite way has
sketched the benchers of the Temple whom he had seen pacing the terrace
in his youth. Jekyll, with the roguish eye, and Thomas Coventry, of the
elephantine step, the scarecrow of inferiors, the browbeater of equals,
who made a solitude of children wherever he came, who took snuff by
palmfuls, diving for it under the mighty flap of his old-fashioned red
waistcoat. In the gentle Samuel Salt we discover a portrait of the
employer of Lamb's father. Salt was a shy indolent, absent man, who
never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his sword. The day of
Miss Blandy's execution he went to dine with a relative of the
murderess, first carefully schooled by his clerk to avoid the
disagreeable subject. However, during the pause for dinner, Salt went to
the window, looked out, pulled down his ruffles, and observed, "It's a
gloomy day; Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." Salt
never laughed. He was a well-known toast with the ladies, having a fine
figure and person. Coventry, on the other hand, was a man worth four or
five hundred thousand, and lived in a gloomy house, like a strong box,
opposite the pump in Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street. Fond of money as he
was, he gave away L30,000 at once to a charity for the blind, and kept a
hospitable house. Salt was indolent and careless of money, and but for
Lovel, his clerk, would have been universally robbed. This