likewise remember that you require us implicitly to believe a fact, which, were it true, positive and irrefragable evidence in Shakespeare's own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not having been actually inrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at Stratford, nor of the superior courts at Westminster, would present his name, as being concerned in any suits as an attorney; but it might have been reasonably expected that there would have been deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant; —and, after a very diligent search, none such can be discovered. Nor can this consideration be disregarded, that between Nash's Epistle in the end of the 16th century, and Chalmers's suggestion more than two hundred years after, there is no hint by his foes or his friends of Shakespeare having consumed pens, paper, ink, and pounce in an attorney's office at Stratford.* I am quite serious and sincere in what I have written about Nash and Robert Greene having asserted the fact; but I by no means think that on this ground alone it must necessarily be taken for truth. Their statement * "Three years I sat his smoky room in, Pleader's Guide. that he had belonged to the profession of the law may be as false as that he was a plagiarist from Seneca. Nash and Robert Greene may have invented it, or repeated it on same groundless rumour. Shakespeare may have contradicted and refuted it twenty times; or, not thinking it discreditable, though untrue, he may have thought it undeserving of any notice. Observing what fictitious statements are introduced into the published "Lives" of living individuals, in our own time, when truth in such matters can be so much more easily ascertained, and error so much more easily corrected, we should be slow to give faith to an uncorroborated statement made near three centuries ago by persons who were evidently actuated by malice.* * In several successive Lives of Lord Chief Justice Campbell it is related that, by going for a few weeks to Ireland as Chancellor, he obtained a pension of 4000l. a year, which he has ever since received, thereby robbing the public; whereas in truth and in fact, he made it a stipulation on his going to Ireland that he should receive no pension-and pension he never did receive—and, without pension or place, for years after he returned from Ireland he regularly served the public in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in the judicial business of the House of Lords. This erroneous statement is to be found in a recent Life of Lord C., which is upon the whole laudatory above due measure, but in which the author laments that there was one fault to be imputed to him which could not be passed over by an impartial biographer, viz., that he had most improperly obtained this Irish pension, which he What you have mainly to rely upon (and this consideration may prevail in your favour with a large majority of the literary world) is the seemingly utter impossibility of Shakespeare having acquired, on any other theory, the wonderful knowledge of law which he undoubtedly displays. But we must bear in mind that, although he was a mortal man, and nothing miraculous can be attributed to him, he was intellectually the most gifted of mankind, and that he was capable of acquiring knowledge where the opportunities he enjoyed would have been insufficient for any other. Supposing that John the father lived as a gentleman, or respectably carried on trade as one of the principal inhabitants of the town, and that William the son, from the time of leaving the grammar-school till he went to London, resided with his father, assisting him in the management of his houses and land and any ancillary business carried on by him,-the son might have been in the habit of attending trials in the Stratford Court of Record, and when of age he might have been summoned to serve as a juryman there or at the Court Leet; he might have been intimate with some of the attorneys still continues to receive without any benefit being derived by the public from his services.-Lord C. ought to speak tenderly of Biographers, but I am afraid that they may sometimes be justly compared to the hogs of Westphalia, who without discrimination pick up what falls from one another. who practised in the town and with their clerks, and while in their company at fairs, wakes, church ales, bowling-, bell-ringing-, and hurling-matches, he might not only have picked up some of their professional jargon, but gained some insight into the principles of their calling, which are not without interest to the curious. Moreover, it is to be considered that, although Shakespeare in 1589 was unquestionably a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and had trod the boards as an actor, the time when he began to write for the stage is uncertain; and we are not in possession of any piece which we assuredly know to have been written and finished by him before the year 1592. Thus there was a long interval between his arrival in London and the publication of any of the dramas from which my selections are made. In this interval he was no doubt conversant with all sorts and conditions of men. I am sorry to say I cannot discover that at any period of his life Lord Chancellors or Lord Chief Justices showed the good taste to cultivate his acquaintance.* But he must have been intimate with the students at the Inns of * Although it is said that Shakespeare was introduced to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, Lord Somers is the first legal dignitary I find forming friendships with literary men. Court, who were in the habit of playing before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich, as he took a part in these court theatricals; and the author, in all probability, was present among the lawyers when Twelfth Night' was brought out at the Readers' Feast in the Middle Temple, and when 'Othello' was acted at Lord Chancellor Ellesmere's before Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare, during his first years in London, when his purse was low, may have dined at the ordinary in Alsatia, thus described by Dekker, where he may have had a daily surfeit of law, if, with his universal thirst for knowledge, he had any desire to drink deeply at this muddy fountain : * There is another ordinary at which your London usurer, your stale bachelor, and your thrifty attorney do resort; the price threepence; the rooms as full of company as a gaol; and indeed divided into several wards, like the beds of an hospital. If they chance to discourse, it is of nothing but of statutes, bonds, recognizances, fines, recoveries, audits, rents, subsidies, sureties, enclosures, liveries, indictments, outlawries, feoffments, judgments, commissions, bankrupts, amercements, and of such horrible matter." -Dekker's Gull's Hornbook, 1609. In such company a willing listener might soon make great progress in law;—and it may be urged, that I have unconsciously exaggerated the difficulty to be encountered by Shakespeare in picking up his know |