to collect, are contained in twenty-nine pages of his first volume, and it would seem that no homogeneous or scientific bar existed prior to the organization of the new State govern

ment.

If this be taken as its beginning, the Philadelphia bar included from the very first days of its existence men who would have been regarded as accomplished lawyers in any court, at home or abroad, from that day to this. It was an era of great men, and the representatives of the new world were not inferior to their contemporaries on the other side of the Atlantic. Lord Chatham's remark in reference to the members of Carpenters' Hall convention is well known. "For myself," he said, "I must declare and avow that in all my reading and observation (and it has been my favorite study -I have read Thucydides and have studied and admired the master states of the world), I say I must declare that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances no nation or body of men could stand in preference to the general Congress at Philadelphia."

In an address to the Associated Members of the Bar of Philadelphia, as the Law Association was then styled, Mr. William Rawle, who had been a student in the Temple, says of the lawyers of the time of the Revolution: "There were men whom we would not have feared to oppose to an equal number from the excellent bar of Westminster Hall;" and writing in the middle of the century, Mr. Binney says of the leaders of the old bar that "one and all of them would have been regarded as able men in Westminster Hall, more than one of them would have stood at the height of that bar, and their superiors have not, I think, shown themselves in any part of our land.”

But, unlike reading and writing, knowledge of the law does not come by nature, and one who reads or hears of the leaders of the old bar will always naturally inquire how they came to be the accomplished lawyers they are said to have been. The explanation is one which cannot be recalled too

often. They had spared no expense of time or money to obtain the best possible legal education before they entered upon the practice of law, and taking all things into consideration no men ever had better opportunities for preparation. In the life of his grandfather, President Reed, William B. Reed says: "Professional education was not at that time thought complete without the advantages which attendance in the Inns of Court was supposed to confer, and many of the young lawyers, at least in the Middle colonies, added two years of study at the Temple to the regular period of instruction at home." Joseph Reed sailed for England in the summer of 1763, and remained a student in the Middle Temple until the spring of 1765. In a footnote the author gives his certificate of membership and memorandum of expenses, but regrets his inability to refer particularly to the course of professional studies.

Writing more recently, Dr. Charles J. Stillé, a former member of this association, has given in his history of the "Life and Times of John Dickinson" a most interesting account of the Inns of Court and their influence upon the lawyers of the colonies. Dickinson himself had studied for three years in the office of John Moland, Esq., in this city, before going to London, and, having entered the Temple in 1753, did not return to Philadelphia until 1757. Dr. Stillé states that of one hundred and fifteen American students who were admitted to the different Inns of Court from 1760 to the close of the Revolution, South Carolina sent forty-seven, Virginia twenty-one. Maryland sixteen, Pennsylvania eleven, New York five and New England only one or two—just as only one of the sixty-three American graduates from the University of Edinburgh between 1758 and 1785 came from New England. He adds that "from Pennsylvania we find as the worthy successors of Dickinson and others who received their legal education in those Inns of Court between the year 1750 and 1760, a class of men whom to name is to present a brilliant array, not only of those who laid the foundation of the reputation of the Philadelphia bar for learning and ability,

but of those also who exerted the most potent influence in building up our political system during the Revolutionary era. In this list are to be found the names of Nicholas Waln, Jasper Yeates, Joseph Reed, Andrew Hamilton, three Tilghmans (Richard, Edward and William), Thomas McKean, Jared Ingersoll, Moses Frank, William Rawle, Benjamin Chew and Peter Markoe, all of whom are well known to have been of the highest professional standing not only in the province, but throughout the colonies."

It is true that no corporate or official instruction was at that time given under the authority of the Inns of Court, and that until Blackstone began his lectures in 1758 no course of study was presented and no public instruction furnished, even in the universities, for students preparing for admission to the English bar. It was customary, however, to read in the office of a preceptor-usually a special pleader or conveyancing counsel and to enjoy the advantage of his supervision and instruction, as was long the custom in this city. It also appears that those who contemplated going abroad prepared themselves in advance by previous study, and in some cases at least they had been actually admitted, as were Dickinson and Reed, before leaving home. An edition of Blackstone, of which the first volume was published in England in 1765, was published in this city in 1771-2, and it is not probable that any of the young men who went from this city to enter the Inns of Court had failed to make ready to profit by such an experience, for a visit to the old world was not the commonplace affair it has since become. Going from a life so primitive as that of Philadelphia, any youth of sensibility must have been stirred and stimulated by the sights and associations of London, and it would have been strange, indeed, if any student could have been more diligent or better prepared to profit by what he saw and heard than the American of that day, who was beginning to think of what value the great muniments of freedom, which were his birthright as a British subject, were to be to him and his. Westminster Hall and the gardens and halls of the Temple

have not yet lost their charm to the American lawyer who visits them for the first time after reaching manhood; but every day of his life must have been full of interest to the colonist then a student in the Inns of Court. His intercourse with his fellows, his readings in the great libraries, his attendance upon the courts and upon the debates of Parliament must have keyed up an ambitious youth to the highest pitch of exertion and urged him to the utmost of his powers. These young Americans, therefore, not only had every advantage which the most favored Englishman could command, but they were able to look at things from a different point of view, and to take their measure, as it were, from the outside -at once native and to the manner born, and yet already in some sense alien in temper, and soon to become citizens of a free and independent state.

Some of them, too, were welcomed in the best English society, and the intimacy of Richard Tilghman with his kinsman, known to history as Sir Philip Francis, led to the discovery in our own day of the one decisive proof, in the way of handwriting, of the authorship of the Letters of Junius. In Twistleton and Chabot's "Handwriting of Junius," the story is told of the visit of the cousins to Bath, and the sending to a young lady of a copy of verses, of which the handwriting, long ascribed to Francis, was said by Chabot to be that of Tilghman. Complete confirmation of this opinion was found in their correspondence, and the suggestion that Tilghman furnished the law of the famous letters may have been well founded. In writing to Philadelphia, Francis says of him: "He leads a pleasant sort of life, and studies law like a dragon." The incident derives an additional interest from the mention in Mr. Binney's eulogium of Chief Justice Tilghman of his relationship to Dr. Philip Francis, the translator of Horace, "a scholar accomplished in the literature of the age of Augustus." Many of the others were equally fortunate. Their apprenticeship thus enabled them to become familiar by actual handling, if not by complete perusal, with the treatises and reports which contained the great body of

the English law, and to learn the relative value of author and reporter. It afforded opportunities also to associate, in chambers, at mess and in their homes, with those who were to become the great men of the profession and of public lifeamong Dickinson's fellow students in the Middle Temple were Thurlow and Kenyon-and to watch the leaders of the English bar before the jury or addressing the court, and to listen to the debates in the Houses of Parliament-Mr. Rawle illustrated Attorney-General Sergeant's manner of speaking by referring to a peculiarity which he had “occasionally noticed in the public speeches of Charles Fox" and, in short, gave them every privilege which could be secured at that day for any student.

When they came back, after such an experience, to create as it were a bar of their own in the new Commonwealth, they brought with them an ideal of learning, accomplishment and bearing which constituted a standard to which they themselves conformed, and which they transmitted to their successors. The evidence of their own success does not rest merely upon tradition, though that was derived by men now living from those who spoke from personal knowledge. The coming of Mr. Charles Chauncey to this city was determined by the advice of Chief Justice Ellsworth, who recommended him to do so upon the ground that the bar of Philadelphia at that time was the strongest bar in the country. The Federal as well as the State reports have preserved their arguments, and the leaders of the old bar still live for us in such masterpieces as Mr. Binney painted in his sketches of William Lewis, Edward Tilghman and Jared Ingersoll, and in his eulogiums upon Chauncey, Sergeant and Chief Justice Tilghman.

Having had thorough preparation, they found from the start abundant occasion for the exercise of the greatest industry and ability. In proportion to its volume, the business of the Philadelphia bar during the years immediately succeeding the Revolution down to the end of the wars of Napoleon and the Treaty of Ghent was of unsurpassed interest, variety and importance. To take part in such litigation as then arose