Rich in satire directed against law and its professors, the literature of the Commonwealth affords conclusive testimony of the low esteem in which lawyers were held in the seventeenth century by the populace, and shows how universal was the belief that wearers of ermine and gentlemen of the long robe would practice any sort of fraud or extortion for the sake of personal advantage. In the pamphlets and broadsides, in the squibs and ballads of the period, may be found a wealth of quaint narrative and broad invective, setting forth the rascality of judges and attorneys, barristers and scriveners. Any literary effort to throw contempt upon the law was sure of success. The light jesters, who made merry with the phraseology and costumes of Westminster Hall, were only a few degrees less welcome than the stronger and more indignant scribes who cried aloud against the sins and sinners of the courts. When simple folk had expended their rage in denunciations of venal eloquence and unjust judgments, they amused themselves with laughing at the antiquated verbiage of the rascals who sought to conceal their bad morality under worse Latin. 'A New Modell, or the Conversion of the Infidell Terms of the Law: For the Better promoting of misunderstanding according to Common Sense,' is a publication consisting of a cover or fly-leaf and two leaves, that appeared about a year before the Restoration. The wit is not brilliant; its humor is not free from uncleanness; but its comic renderings[17] of a hundred law terms illustrate the humor of the times. More serious in aim, but not less comical in result, is William Cole's 'A Rod for the Lawyers. London, Printed in the year 1659.' The preface of this mad treatise ends thus--"I do not altogether despair but that before I dye I may see the Inns of Courts, or dens of Thieves, converted into Hospitals, which were a rare piece of justice; that as they formerly have immured those that robbed the poor of houses, so they may at last preserve the poor themselves." Another book touching on the same subject and belonging to the same period, is, 'Sagrir, or Doomsday drawing nigh; With Thunder and Lightning to Lawyers, (1653) by John Rogers.'