as a man
too humble in rank and fortune. Having won the lady and married her, Mr.
Philip Yorke brought her home to a 'very small house' near Lincoln's
Inn; and in that lowly dwelling, the ground-floor of which was the
barrister's office, they spent the first years of their wedded life.
What would be said of the rising barrister who, now-a-days, on his
marriage with a rich squire's rich daughter and a peer's niece, should
propose to set up his household gods in a tiny crip just outside
Lincoln's Inn gate, and to use the parlor of the 'very small house' for
professional purposes? Far from being guilty of unseemly parsimony in
this arrangement, Philip Yorke paid proper consideration to his wife's
social advantages, in taking her to a separate house. His contemporaries
amongst the junior bar would have felt no astonishment if he had fitted
up a set of chambers for his wealthy and well-descended bride. Not
merely in his day, but for long years afterward, lawyers of gentle birth
and comfortable means, who married women scarcely if at all inferior to
Mrs. Yorke in social condition, lived upon the flats of Lincoln's Inn
and the Temple.

CHAPTER II.

THE LAST OF THE LADIES.

Whatever its drawbacks, the system which encouraged the young barrister
to marry on a modest income, and make his wife 'happy in chambers,' must
have had special advantages. In their Inn the husband was near every
source of diversion for which he greatly cared, and the wife was
surrounded by the friends of either sex in whose society she took most
pleasure--friends who, like herself, 'lived in the Inn,' or in one of
the immediately adjacent streets. In 'hall' he dined and drank wine with
his professional compeers and the wits of the bar: the 'library'
supplied him not only with law books, but with poems and dramas, with
merry trifles written for the stage, and satires fresh from the Row;
'the chapel'--or if he were a Templer, 'the church'--was his habitual
place of worship, where there were sittings for his wife and children
as well as for himself; on the walks and under the shady trees of 'the
garden' he sauntered with his own, or, better still, a friend's wife,
criticising the passers, describing the new comedy, or talking over the
last ball given by a judge's lady. At times those gardens were pervaded
by the calm of collegiate seclusion, but on 'open days' they were brisk
with life. The women and children of the legal colony walked in them
da