The English lawyers, however, seem to have been no more congenial than the Scotchmen, for he speaks of the 'rough scene of the roaring and bantering society of lawyers,' which he is compelled to be with on the Northern Circuit.[3] There is an amusing story recounted by Lord Eldon in his 'Anecdotes' about Boswell at the Lancaster Assizes, which belongs to a period between the years '86 and '88: We found Jemmy Boswell lying upon the pavement--inebriated. We subscribed at supper a guinea for him and half-a-crown for his clerk, and sent him next morning a brief with instructions to move for the writ _Quare adhæsit pavimento_, with observations calculated to induce him to think that it required great learning to explain the necessity of granting it. He sent all round the town to attornies for books, but in vain. He moved, however, for the writ, making the best use he could of the observations in the brief. The judge was astonished and the audience amazed. The judge said, 'I never heard of such a writ--what can it be that adheres pavimento? Are any of you gentlemen at the Bar able to explain this?' The Bar laughed. At last one of them said, 'My Lord, Mr. Boswell last night _adhæsit pavimento_. There was no moving him for some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has been dreaming about himself and the pavement.' Boswell himself pours out to Temple in plaintive accents the tangled story of a wig lost at Carlisle in 1789, from which we may suspect, as he did himself, another practical joke. 'I suspected a wanton trick, which some people think witty, but I thought it very ill-timed to one in my situation.' We might judge from the manner in which he was treated by his fellow-lawyers that Boswell was not wholly successful at the English Bar. No one can have realised this more keenly than himself. 'I am sadly discouraged,' he writes, 'by having no practice, nor probable prospect of it.... Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination. I must be seen in the courts, and must hope for some happy openings in causes of importance. The Chancellor, as you observe, has not done as I expected; but why did I expect it?' Later in the same year, 1789, he exclaims: 'O Temple! Temple! is this realising any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters?' It is pathetic to see him clinging still to the old hopes and ideals, when his real title to fame lay near at hand in his Johnsonian stores, so much thought of, and yet so little valued beside the great world of practical affairs.