In the old times the Lord Chancellor held his sittings in the great hall of Lincoln’s Inn. Here, too, at the Christmas revels, the King of the Cockneys administered _his_ laws. Jack Straw, a sort of rebellious rival, was put down, with all his adherents, as a bad precedent for the Essexes and Norfolks of the inn, by wary Queen Elizabeth, who always kept a firm grip on her prerogative. In the same reign absurd sumptuary laws, vainly trying to fix the quicksilver of fashion, forbade the students to wear long hair, long beards, large ruffs, huge cloaks, or big spurs. The fine for wearing a beard of more than a fortnight’s growth was three shillings and fourpence.[685] In her father’s time beards had been prohibited under pain of double commons. In the old hall, replaced by the new Tudor building, stood one of Hogarth’s most pretentious but worst pictures, “Paul preaching before Felix,” an ill-drawn and ludicrous caricature of epic work. The society paid for it. It is now rolled up and hid away with as much contumely as Kent’s absurdity at St. Clement’s when Hogarth parodied it. The new hall of Lincoln’s Inn was built by Mr. P. Hardwick, the architect of the St. Katherine Docks, and was opened by the Queen in person in 1845. It is a fine Tudor building of red brick, with stone dressings. The hall is 120 feet, the library 80 feet long. The contract was taken for £55,000, but its cost exceeded that sum. The library contains the unique fourth volume of Prynne’s _Records_, which the society bought for £335 at the Stow sale in 1849, and all Sir Matthew Hale’s bequests of books and MSS.: “a treasure,” says that “excellent good man,” as Evelyn calls him[686] in his will, “that is not fit for every man’s view.” The hall contains a fresco representing the “Lawgivers of the World,” by Watts. The gardens were much curtailed by the erection of the hall, and their quietude destroyed. Ben Jonson talks of the walks under the elms.[687] Steele seems to have been fond of this garden when he felt meditative. In May 1709, he says much hurry and business having perplexed him into a mood too thoughtful for company, instead of the tavern “I went into Lincoln’s Inn Walk, and having taken a round or two, I sat down, according to the allowed familiarity of these places, on a bench.” In a more thoughtful month (November) of the same year he goes again for a solitary walk in the garden, “a favour that is indulged me by several of the benchers, who are very intimate friends, and grown old in the neighbourhood.” It was this bright frosty night, when the whole body of air had been purified into “bright transparent æther,” that Steele imagined his vision of “The Return of the Golden Age.”