V 702 V. BENCH AND BAR Inns, but at the Restoration they started on a new career of splendor. All the old ceremonies and practices were revived. Heneage Finch, afterwards Lord Nottingham, revived the readers' feasts of former days. He saved the Temple walk from being built upon ; and his daily consumption of wine offered an admirable example to the deep drinking young blades of the Restoration. The two great lawers of Charles II. 's reign were almost exact opposites. Finch, born of an ancient family, of ample fortune, living in magnificent style, princely in his expendi- tures, a genuine cavalier, was the very antithesis of the Puri- tanism of Hale. His is one of the noted names on the roll of Christ Church at Oxford. He is the second of our great forensic orators. Ben Jonson has told us of Bacon's impressive and weighty eloquence, but, it could not be com- pared with the silver-tongued oratory and the graceful gestures of the " English Roscius." Finch passed through the grade of Solicitor-General, to the Attorney-General's place, and then became Lord Chancellor, with the title of Lord Nottingham. He was a model of judicial decorum, calm and patient in hearing, prompt in the business of his court, sitting to decide cases while racked with the pain of gout. Careful in the framing of his judgments, and at the same time, a finished man of the world, he stands unrivaled except by Lord Mansfield. When he came to the marble chair, equity jurisprudence was a confused mass of unrelated precedents. While he invented nothing new, he introduced order into the chaos and settled the great heads of equity in their enduring form. " Our laws that did a boundless ocean seem. Were coasted all, and fathomed all by him." He settled, finally, the restraint upon executory interests, by his great ruling in the Duke of Norfolk's case,^ It has been forgotten that Nottingham overruled the three chiefs of the common law courts — North, Pemberton and Montague — sitting with him. North, becoming Chancellor, reversed the case, but the House of Lords, at the instance of Lord »3 Ch. Cas. 1.
