Many amusing stories are told of the Lawyer Volunteers--how Erskine used to read the word of command from the back of a paper like a brief, and how Lord Eldon and Lord Ellenborough had to be dismissed for sheer inability to learn the ‘goose-step.’ And it was said that when the word ‘charge’ was given, every member of the Corps produced a note-book and forthwith wrote down six and eightpence! Such was the origin of the subsequent Volunteer Corps, which, when the Volunteer movement came again to the front in the crisis of 1859, was enrolled as the 23rd Middlesex--a title afterwards changed to the 14th Middlesex. Upon the standard of this Inns of Court Volunteer Corps it was proposed to inscribe the appropriate phrase, ‘Retained for the Defence.’ Its popular title, the Devil’s Own, which it still keeps, is inherited from George III.’s witticism--if it was indeed his--anent the Legal Association. For the South African War some forty men were selected from the Inns of Court for service with the specially raised City Imperial Volunteers, popularly known as the C.I.V. In the welter of War Office rearrangements the existence of the Devil’s Own has been almost miraculously preserved ‘for the Defence.’ But, of course, its title has been altered. The 14th (Inns of Court) Middlesex Volunteer Rifle Corps has now become the 27th London Regiment. CHAPTER VII GRAY’S INN Beyond Lincoln’s Inn, across Holborn--the road which takes its name from the burn that flowed through the hollow--lies Gray’s Inn, a great quiet domain, quadrangle upon quadrangle, with a large space of greensward enclosed within it. ‘Nothing else in London,’ so Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, ‘is so like the effect of a spell as to pass under one of these archways and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of weekdays condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city’s very jaws--which yet the monster shall not eat up--right in its very belly indeed, which yet in all these ages it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets.’ Yet the site of Gray’s Inn lies outside the City Boundary, and the Chambers, where Francis Bacon wrote, were set in a quiet spot amidst gardens, beyond which stretched Gray’s Inn Fields, intersected by the country roads of Holborn and Gray’s Inn Lane. The latter lane took the name of Theobald’s Road later, because it led to Theobalds in Hertfordshire, which was the favourite hunting seat of King James I. In these fields beyond Gray’s Inn Lord Berkeley’s hounds showed sport to the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court in the reign of Queen Mary.