The books of the Middle Temple do not commence till the reign of King Henry VII., the first treasurer named in them being John Brooke, in the sixteenth year of Henry VII. (1500-1). Readers were not appointed till the following year, the earliest being John Vavasour--probably son of the judge, and not, as Dugdale calls him, the judge himself, who had then been on the bench for twelve years. Members of the house might be excused from living in commons on account of their wives being in town, or for other special reasons (Foss). In the last year of Philip and Mary (1558) eight gentlemen of the Temple were expelled the society and committed to the Fleet for wilful disobedience to the Bench, but on their humble submission they were readmitted. A year before this a severe Act of Parliament was passed, prohibiting Templars wearing beards of more than three weeks' growth, upon pain of a forty-shilling fine, and double for every week after monition. The young lawyers were evidently getting too foppish. They were required to cease wearing Spanish cloaks, swords, bucklers, rapiers, gowns, hats, or daggers at their girdles. Only knights and benchers were to display doublets or hose of any light colour, except scarlet and crimson, or to affect velvet caps, scarf-wings to their gowns, white jerkins, buskins, velvet shoes, double shirt-cuffs, or feathers or ribbons in their caps. More over, no attorney was to be admitted into either house. These monastic rules were intended to preserve the gravity of the profession, and must have pleased the Poloniuses and galled the Mercutios of those troublous days. In Elizabeth's days Master Gerard Leigh, a pedantic scholar of the College of Heralds, persuaded the misguided Inner Temple to abandon the old Templar arms--a plain red cross on a shield argent, with a lamb bearing the banner of the sinless profession, surmounted by a red cross. The heraldic euphuist substituted for this a flying Pegasus striking out the fountain of Hippocrene with its hoofs, with the appended motto of "Volat ad astera virtus," a recondite allusion to men, like Chaucer and Gower, who, it is said, had turned from lawyers to poets. CHAPTER XV. THE TEMPLE (_continued_). The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits--Manningham's Diary--Fox Hunts in Hall--The Grand Revels--Spenser--Sir J. Davis--A Present to a King--Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple--Fires in the Temple--The Last Great Revel in the Hall--Temple Anecdotes--The Gordon Riots--John Scott and his Pretty Wife--Colman "Keeping Terms"--Blackstone's "Farewell"--Burke--Sheridan--A Pair of Epigrams--Hare Court--The Barber's Shop--Johnson and the Literary Club--Charles Lamb--Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and Extravagances--"Hack Work" for Booksellers--_The Deserted Village_--_She Stoops to Conquer_--Goldsmith's Death and Burial.