remembered to tell anything about him, did not
write the Works.

Chapter XIII of _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_ bears the heading
"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert
testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine, as
being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle the
question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the
Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.

CHAPTER VIII--Shakespeare as a Lawyer {2}

The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their
author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law, but
that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of members of
the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the
laws of marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to Shakespeare's law,
lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of
exceptions, nor writ of error." Such was the testimony borne by one of
the most distinguished lawyers of the nineteenth century who was raised
to the high office of Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequently became
Lord Chancellor. Its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by
lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is for
those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid
displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and to
discuss legal doctrines. "There is nothing so dangerous," wrote Lord
Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry."
A layman is certain to betray himself by using some expression which a
lawyer would never employ. Mr. Sidney Lee himself supplies us with an
example of this. He writes (p. 164): "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare
. . . obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of
No. 6, and No. 1. 5_s._ 0_d._ costs." Now a lawyer would never have
spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is the function of a
jury not to deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but
to find a verdict on the facts. The error is, indeed, a venial one, but
it is just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to
know if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft."

But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he is
naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence. "Let a
non-professional man, however ac