George Gascoigne, the poet, William Camden, and William Dugdale, the great and learned antiquaries, were all members of Gray’s Inn. Among the poets who resided here are George Chapman, Samuel Butler, John Cleveland, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Southey, who entered the Inn in 1797. Cobbett dwelt here for a season, and another ‘Rymer’ in the author of the ‘Fœdera.’ Dr. Kenealy, who defended ‘the Claimant,’ was the last barrister to have business Chambers here, the tide of legal business having flowed down Chancery Lane. Gray’s Inn can boast a Royal Bencher in the person of H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, who, by a ‘Special Pension’ in 1881, was admitted a Member, called to the Bar, and elected a Bencher in one day. Such, in brief outline, is the history of the Four Inns of Court, in which is vested the monopoly of calling to the Bar of England such students as have kept terms at the Inn, and have commended themselves to the approval of the Benchers. Starting as independent voluntary associations of students and practisers of the law, either in connection with the Court of some great Justiciar, or merely in hostels, where the apprentices might find board and lodging during their years of learning, they developed into Societies, nobly housed, which controlled their students after a collegiate fashion. Without charters, endowments, or title-deeds, they developed on the lines of self-governing Guilds, subject only to a certain ill-defined control by the Judges, whilst their property was vested in a self-elected Committee of Benchers for the time being. It is under the guidance of these Committees that the Inns of Court have gained and maintained their position through the centuries, training the successive generations of barristers in the high traditions of honour and ability characteristic of the English Bar, and imparting to their youthful apprentices at the law, through the social system of ‘keeping terms,’ the unwritten rules of right conduct in the legal profession. It remains now to glance at the Inns which started level in the race with the Inns of Court, but whose history and development have been so different. [Illustration: THE GABLED HOUSES OUTSIDE STAPLE INN, HOLBORN THEY are the sole survivors of Elizabethan domestic architecture to be found in the streets of London. The restoration of the frontage was made in 1884, under the care of Mr. Alfred Waterhouse.] CHAPTER VIII INNS OF CHANCERY