increase of the legal working profession; or in previous times the proportion of law-students who never became barristers greatly exceeded those who were ultimately called to the bar. Something more than a hundred years later, the old cry against the low-born adventurers, who, to the injury of the public and the degradation of the law, were said to overwhelm counsellors and solicitors of superior tone and pedigree, was still frequently heard in the coteries of disappointed candidates for employment in Westminster Hall, and on the lips of men whose hopes of achieving social distinction were likely to be frustrated so long as plebeian learning and energy were permitted to have free action. In his 'History of Hertfordshire' (published in 1700), Sir Henry Chauncey, Sergeant-at-Law, exclaims: "But now these mechanicks, ambitious of rule and government, often educate their sons in these seminaries of law, whereby they overstock the profession, and so make it contemptible; whilst the gentry, not sensible of the mischief they draw upon themselves, but also upon the nation, prefer them in their business before their own children, whom they bereave of their employment, formerly designed for their support; qualifying their servants, by the profit of this profession, to purchase their estates, and by this means make them their lords and masters, whilst they lessen the trade of the kingdom, and cause a scarcity of husbandmen, workmen, artificers, and servants in the nation." That the Inns of Court became less and less aristocratic throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is no reason to doubt; but it may be questioned whether it was so overstocked with competent working members, as poor Sir Henry Chauncey imagined it. Describing the state of the inns some two generations later, Blackstone computed the number of law-students at about a thousand, perhaps slightly more; and he observes that in his time the merely _nominal_ law-students were comparatively few. "Wherefore," he says, "few gentlemen now resort to the Inns of Court, but such for whom the knowledge of practice is absolutely necessary; such, I mean, as are intended for the profession; the rest of our gentry, (not to say our nobility also) having usually retired to their estates, or visited foreign kingdoms, or entered upon public life, without any instruction in the laws of the land, and indeed with hardly any opportunity of gaining instruction, unless it can be afforded to them in the universities."