rance, in point of fact, depriving them of the benefit of clergy. As Cade says, Thou hast put men in prison; and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them; when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live. Cade's proclamation, announcing the policy he should pursue during his administra tion, alludes to an ancient feudal custom: The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me tribute; there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead ere they have it: men shall hold of me in capite; and we charge and command that their wives be as free as heart can wish or tongue can tell. The lord of the fee had anciently a right to lie with his tenant's wife on her wedding night. Cade declares his intention to assume this right, "with this alteration, that instead of conferring the privilege on every lord of a manor, to be exercised within the manor, he is to assume it exclusively for himself all over the realm, as belonging to his prerogative royal;" imitating, in this respect, the custom of one of the nations of Libyans (as related by Herodotus), who exhibited to the king their virgins who were about to marry; and, if any one suited the pleasure of his majesty, he deflowered her. Cade then proceeds to announce, as a part of the policy of his government, that he shall abolish tenure in free socage and that all men shall hold of him in capite; and, although his subjects should no longer hold in free socage, "their wives should be as free as heart can wish or tongue can tell." Strange to say, says Lord Campbell, this phrase, or one almost identically the same, "as free as tongue can speak or heart can think," is feudal, and was known to the ancient law of England. In the tenth year of King Henry VII., Lord Chief Justice Hussey, in a considered judgment, delivered the opinion of the whole Court of King's Bench as to the construction to be put upon the words, "as free as tongue can speak or heart can think." Melpom. iv. 168. Lord Campbell. Year Book, Hil. Absque hoc. Stephen Pl. 193- The Reporters, pp. 147-153, 4th ed. Plowd. 253 In "The Second Part of Henry IV.," Act v. sc. 5, Pistol uses the term, absque hoc, which is technical in the last degree. This was a species of traverse, used by special pleaders when the record was in Latin, known by the denomination of a special traverse. The subtlety of its texture, and the total dearth of explanation in all the Reports and treatises extant in the time of Shakespeare with respect to its principle, seem to justify the conclusion that he must have attained a knowledge of it from actual practice. The first scene in the fifth act of "Hamlet" "is the mine which has produced the richest legal ore." I print from "The Reporters" Mr. Wallace's entertaining version of this scene, and of the legal and logical subtleties involved in the celebrated case of Hales v. Petit reported in Plowden's Commentaries, the arguments and decision in which it has been suggested that Shakespeare intended to ridicule. It has been supposed by a very grave writer, at once a lawyer and a critic, and, indeed, has been very extensively believed, that Hales v. Petit, one of Plowden's cases, furnished to Shakespeare part of the scene of the grave-diggers in Hamlet. Whether, as it has been thus supposed, Shakespeare ever studied the Reports of Plowden, then still in Norman French, or whether only in the pervading ubiquity and power of his genius, he was uttering, in the unreal dialogue of clowns, the actual language of ermined nonsense, may not now be easy to decide. For myself, I should rather recall the suggestions of Gibbon, who, noting some beautiful lines of Gregory Nazianzen, which burst from the heart and speak the pangs of injured and lost friendship, directs attention to the coincidence of phraseology in these and the pathetic complaint which Helena in The Midsummer Night's Dream" addresses to her friend, Hermia, upon the same subject. "Shakespeare," he adds, however, " had never read the poems of Gregory Nazianzen: he Sir John Hawkins, note to Hamlet, Act Y. SC. I. "The New Variorum,' vol. iii. p. 376 note. Decline and Fall, chapter xxvii., A. D. 340, 380. The Reporters, p. 148, 4th ed. was ignorant of the Greek language; but his mother-tongue, the language of Nature, is the same in Cappadocia and in Britain.' Whether Shakespeare studied Plowden or not, his grave-diggers in Hamlet, it is certain, have left a satire on the "sober follies" of the court, by arguments so like their own as to have originated the conjecture that "Decisions in Westminster" must have been transcribed for the entertainment of groundlings at the "Globe Theatre" and "Blackfriars." The case was thus: Sir James Hales, one of the Justices of Common Pleas, and the son of Sir John Hales, eminent as a Baron of the Exchequer, had committed suicide, in his sober senses, by drowning himself in a river or watercourse near his house in Canterbury. The coroner, with his jury, sat upon the body, and presented that "passing through ways and streets in the same city unto the aforesaid river," Sir James had "voluntarily entered the same, and himself therein feloniously and voluntarily drowned." A lease to him and |