Behind Great Knight-Riders' Street is Doctors' Commons, so called from the Doctors of Civil Law who dined together four days in each term. The Court of Admiralty is also there. The Admiralty judge is preceded by an officer with a silver oar. There is something pleasing in the parade of a civil officer, thus announced by a symbol representing the regulation of the most turbulent of elements.
The civil and ecclesiastical lawyers, who connect the law with the church, had formerly much more to do than they have at present. The proctors (or attorneys) are said to have been so numerous and so noisy in the time of Henry VII., that the judge sometimes could not be heard for them. They thrust themselves into causes without the parties' consent, and shouldered the advocates out of their business. The diminution of their body was owing to Cranmer. Doctors' Commons are of painful celebrity in the annals of domestic trouble. We have hardly perhaps among us a remnant of greater barbarism than "an action for damages,"[57] whether considered with a view to recompense or prevention. Doctors' Commons bind as well as set loose. "Hence originates," says the facetious Mr. Malcolm, "the awful scrap of parchment, bearing the talismanic mark of _John Cantuar_ (the Archbishop of Canterbury), which constitutes thousands of Benedicts the happiest or most miserable of married men: in short, it is the grand lottery of life, in which, fortunately, there are far more prizes than blanks."[58] The community ought to be thankful to Mr. Malcolm for this last piece of information, as there is a splenetic notion among them to the contrary.
A history deeply interesting to human nature might be drawn up from the documents preserved in this place; for besides cases of personal infidelity, here are to be found others of _infidelity religious_, of blasphemy, simony, &c., together with romantic questions relative to kindred and succession; and here are deposited those last specimens of human strength or weakness--last wills and testaments, together with cases in which they have been contested. It was these records that furnished us with accounts of the latest days of Milton; and that set the readers of Shakspeare speculating why he should make no mention of his wife, except to leave her his "second best bed;"--a question most unexpectedly as well as happily cleared up by Mr. Charles Knight, who shows that the bequest was to the lady's honour. Of the practisers in the civil courts, we can call to mind nothing more worthy of recollection than the strange name of one of them, "Sir Julius Cæsar," and the ruinous volatility of poor Dr. King, the Tory wit, who is conjectured to have been the only civilian that ever went to reside in Ireland, "after having experienced the emoluments of a settlement in Doctors' Commons." The doctor unfortunately practised too much with the bottle, which hindered him from adhering long to anything.