the hall, and fell to protesting against such illegall and arbitrary proceedings, subscribing their names to a greater number than the addressers were, and presented the same to the bench as a grievance." Like the King's Head Tavern, which stood in Chancery Lane, the Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, was a favorite house with the Caroline Lawyers. Its proximity to the Temple secured the special patronage of the templars, whereas the King's Head was more frequented by Lincoln's-Inn men; and in the tavern-haunting days of the seventeenth century those two places of entertainment saw many a wild and dissolute scene. Unlike Chattelin, who endeavored to satisfy his guests with delicate repasts and light wines, the hosts of the Devil and the King's Head provided the more substantial fare of old England, and laid themselves out to please roysterers who liked pots of ale in the morning, and were wont to drink brandy by the pint as the clocks struck midnight. Nando's, the house where Thurlow in his student-period used to hold nightly disputations with all comers of suitable social rank, was an orderly place in comparison with these more venerable hostelries; and though the Mitre, Cock, and Rainbow have witnessed a good deal of deep drinking, it may be questioned if they, or any other ancient taverns of the legal quarter, encouraged a more boisterous and reckless revelry than that which constituted the ordinary course of business at the King's Head and the Devil. In his notes for Jan. 1681-2, Mr. Narcissus Luttrell observes--"The 13th, at night, some young gentlemen of the Temple went to the King's Head Tavern, Chancery Lane, committing strange outrages there, breaking windowes, &c., which the watch hearing of came to disperse them; but they sending for severall of the watermen with halberts that attend their comptroller of the revells, were engaged in a desperate riott, in which one of the watchmen was run into the body and lies very ill; but the watchmen secured one or two of the watermen." Eleven years later the diarist records: "Jan. 5. One Batsill, a young gentleman of the Temple, was committed to Newgate for wounding a captain at the Devil Tavern in Fleet Street on Saturday last." Such ebullitions of manly spirit--ebullitions pleasant enough to the humorist, but occasionally productive of very disagreeable and embarrassing consequences--were not uncommon in the neighborhood of the Inns of Court whilst the Christmas revels were in progress.