s dramas to evince
Shakespeare's _technical skill_ in the _forms of law_. ...But was it not
the practice of the times, for other makers, like the bees tolling from
every flower the virtuous _sweets_, to gather from the thistles of the
law _the sweetest_ honey? Does not Spenser gather many a metaphor from
these weeds, that are most apt to grow in _fattest_ soil? Has not
Spenser his law-terms: his _capias, defeasance_, and _duresse_; his
_emparlance_; his _enure, essoyn_, and _escheat_; his _folkmote,
forestall_ and _gage_; his _livery_ and _seasin, wage_ and _waif_? It
will be said, however, that, whatever the learning of Spenser may have
gleaned, the law-books of that age were impervious to the illiterature
of Shakespeare. No: such an intellect, when employed on the drudgery of
a wool-stapler, who had been high-bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, might
have derived all that was necessary from a very few books; from Totell's
'Presidents,' 1572; from Pulton's 'Statutes,' 1578; and from the
'Lawier's Logike,' 1588. It is one of the axioms of the 'Flores Regii,'
that, To answer an improbable imagination is to fight against a
vanishing shadow."--p. 553.

And again, in his "Supplemental Apology," etc., 1799, Chalmers
remarks,--

"The biographers, without adequate proofs, have bound Shakespeare an
apprentice to some country attorney; as Mr. Malone has sent him without
sufficient warrant to the desk of some seneschal of a county court: but
these are obscurities that require other lights than conjecture and
assertion, which, by proving nothing, only establish disbelief."--p.
226.

So much for Chalmers's having "first suggested" the theory, of which
Lord Campbell has undertaken the support. Surely his Lordship must have
been verifying Rosalind's assertion, that lawyers sleep between term and
term, or else he is guilty of having loosely made a direct assertion in
regard to a subject upon which he had not taken the trouble to inform
himself; although he professes (p. 10) to have "read nearly all that has
been written on Shakespeare's _ante-Londinensian_ life, and carefully
examined his writings with a view to obtain internal evidence as to his
education and breeding."

One exhibition of his Lordship's inaccuracy is surprising. Commenting
upon Falstaff's threat, "Woe to my Lord Chief Justice!" (2d _Henry_ IV.,
Act V., Sc. 4,) he remarks, (p. 73,) "Sir W. Gascoigne was _continued_
as Lord Chief Justice _in the new reign_; but, accor