There is no person, we believe, who is acquainted with the important duties of the Judges, or the laborious nature of their office, will think that they are too amply remunerated; and it is not a little remarkable, that when law and lawyers have increased so prodigiously, the number of the Judges is still the same. Fortescue, in the dedication of his work, De Laudibus Legum Anglise, to Prince Edward, says that the Judges were not accustomed to sit more than three hours in a day; that is, from eight o'clock in the morning until eleven; they passed the remainder of the day in studying the laws, and reading the Holy Scriptures. Carte supposes, that the great reason for the lawyers pushing in shoals to become members of Parliament, arose from their desire to receive the wages then paid them by their constituents. By an act of the 5th of Henry IV. lawyers were excluded from Parliament, not from a contempt of the common law itself, but the professors of it, who, at this time, being auditors to men of property, received an annual stipend, _pro connlio impenso et impendendo_, and were treated as retainers. In Madox's Form. Anglican, there is a form of a retainer during his life, of John de Thorp, as counsel to the Earl of Westmoreland; and it appears by the Household Book of Algernon, fifth Earl of Northumberland, that, in the beginning of the reign of Henry the Eighth, there was, in that family, a regular establishment for two counsellors and their servants. A proclamation was issued on the 6th of November, in the twentieth year of the reign of James I. in which the voters for members of Parliament are directed, “not to choose curious and wrangling lawyers, who may seek reputation by stirring needless questions.” A strong prejudice was at this time excited against lawyers. In Aleyn's Henry VIII. (London, 1638,) we have the following philippic against them:-- “A prating lawyer, (one of those which cloud That honour'd science,) did their conduct take; He talk'd all law, and the tumultuous crowd Thought it had been all gospel that he spake. At length, these fools their common error saw, A lawyer on their side, but not the law.” Pride the drayman used to say, that it would never be well till the lawyers' gowns, like the Scottish colours, were hung up in Westminster Hall. From Chaucer's character of the Temple Manciple, it would appear that the great preferment which advocates in this time chiefly aspired to, was to become steward to some great man: he says,--”