Nor must it be imagined that gay manners and lax morals were less general amongst the veterans than amongst the youngsters of the bar. Judges and sergeants were quite as prone to levity and godless riot as students about to be called; and such was the freedom permitted by professional decorum that leading advocates habitually met their clients in taverns, and having talked themselves dry at the bars of Westminster Hall, drank themselves speechless at the bars of Strand taverns--ere they reeled again into their chambers. The same habits of uproarious self-indulgence were in vogue with the benchers of the inns, and the Doctors of Doctors' Commons. Hale's austerity was the exceptional demeanor of a pious man protesting against the wickedness of an impious age. Had it not been for the shortness of time that had elapsed since Algernon Sidney's trial and sentence, John Evelyn would have seen no reason for censuring the loud hilarity and drunkenness of Jeffreys and Withings at Mrs. Castle's wedding. In some respects, however, the social atmosphere of the inns was far more wholesome in the days of Elizabeth, and for the hundred years following her reign, than it is at present. Sprung in most cases from legal families, the students who were educated to be working members of the bar lived much more under the observation of their older relations, and in closer intercourse with their mothers and sisters than they do at present. Now-a-days young Templars, fresh from the universities, would be uneasy and irritable under strict domestic control; and as men with beards and five-and-twenty years' knowledge of the world, they would resent any attempt to draw them within the lines of domestic control. But in Elizabethan and also in Stuart London, law-students were considerably younger than they are under Victoria. Moreover, the usage of the period trained young men to submit with cheerfulness to a parental discipline that would be deemed intolerable by our own youngsters. During the first terms of their eight, seven, or at least six years of pupilage, until they could secure quarters within college walls, students frequently lodged in the houses or chambers of near relations who were established in the immediate vicinity of the inns. A judge with a house in Fleet Street, an eminent counsel with a family mansion in Holborn, or an office-holder with commodious chambers in Chancery Lane, usually numbered amongst the members of his family a son, or nephew, or cousin who was keeping terms for the bar. Thus placed under the immediate superintendence of an elder whom he regarded with affection and pride, and surrounded by the wholesome interests of a refined domestic circle, the raw student was preserved from much folly and ill-doing into which he would have fallen had he been thrown entirely on his own resources for amusement.