As time went on, an American was occasionally sent to London to read law. He was apt to be a young man of fortune, who entered the Temple or the Inns of Court more as a means of gaining pleasant acquaintances than for any serious purpose of education. Most of them came from Pennsylvania and the Southern colonies. Two Presidents of the Continental Congress, Randolph and McKean, four signers of the Declaration of Independence, Heyward, Lynch, Middleton, Edward Rutledge, and John Rutledge, one of the first associate justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, were of the number. Not infrequently there were legal proceedings in London which concerned colonial interests. Their charters were attacked or colony laws and judgments put in question before the Lords of Trade and Plantations. In such proceedings, if counsel were needed, English barristers were generally employed. An American lawyer now and then went over to consult with them and perhaps to join in the argument, but the leading part was theirs. It was not until the quickening and deepening of American life which preceded and portended the Revolution that anything like a colonial bar, led by a man of learning and position, really came into existence.[Footnote: "Two Centuries' Growth of American Law," 16.] From the middle of the eighteenth century to its close there was a steady and rapid progress in this direction. Legal education was taken seriously. In the case of many it began with the fundamental notions of justice and right. The Greek and Latin classics on those heads were read.[Footnote: "Life of Peter Van Schaick," 9.] The private law of the Romans was studied to a greater extent relatively than it is now. The first chair of law in the United States was established at William and Mary College in 1779, and there, under Chancellor Wythe, John Marshall was a student. President Stiles of Yale, in his "Literary Diary," so full of that kind of historical incident which after a few years have passed it is most difficult to trace, enumerates the books read by his son, Ezra Stiles, Jr., between 1778 and 1781, in preparation for the Connecticut bar, under the advice and in the offices of Judge Parker of Portsmouth and Charles Chauncey of New Haven. They comprehended, besides much in English and Scotch law, Burlamaqui's _Principes de Droit Naturel_, Montesquieu, _de l'Esprit des Lois_, the Institutes of Justinian, certain titles of the Pandects, and Puffendorf _de Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem_. James Kent at about the same time was reading Grotius and Puffendorf in the office of the Attorney-General of New York, and Edward Livingston, under Chancellor Lansing, explored all parts of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_.[Footnote: Hunt, "Life of Edward Livingston," 41.] John Quincy Adams a few years later, under the instruction of Chief Justice Parsons of Massachusetts, took up Vattel and the Institutes of Justinian.[Footnote: Report of the American Bar Association for