states to them from their guardians. But hence it became a
metaphorical expression to mean merely the attainment of majority, and
in this sense seems to have been very generally understood and not
uncommonly used. See the following from an author who was no attorney or
attorney's clerk:--

"If Cupid
Shoot arrows of that weight, I'll swear devoutly
H'as _sued his livery_ and is no more a boy."
FLETCHER'S _Woman's Prize_, Act ii. Sc. 1.

And this, from the works of a divine:--

"Our little Cupid hath _sued livery_
And is no more in his minority."
DONNE'S Eclogues, 1613.

Spenser, too, uses the phrase figuratively in another sense, in the
following passage,--which may be one of those which Chalmers had in
his eye, when, according to Lord Campbell, he "first suggested" that
Shakespeare was once an attorney's clerk:--

"She gladly did of that same Babe accept,
As of her owne by _liverey and seisin_;
And having over it a litle wept,
She bore it thence, and ever as her owne it kept."
_Faerie Queene_, B. VI. C. iv. st. 37.

So, for an instance of the phrase "fee," which Lord Campbell notices as
one of those expressions and allusions which "crop out" in "Hamlet,"
"showing the substratum of law in the author's mind,"--

"We go to gain a little patch of ground,
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold _in fee_,"--
Act iv. Sc. 2.

and of which Mr. Rushton quotes several instances in its fuller form,
"fee simple,"--we have but to turn back a few stanzas in this same
canto of the "Faerie Queene," to find one in which the term is used with
the completest apprehension of its meaning:--

"So is my lord now _seiz'd of_ all the land,
As _in his fee_, with peaceable _estate_,
And quietly doth hold it in his hand,
Ne any dares with him for it debate."
_Ib_. st. 30.

And in the next canto:--

"Of which the greatest part is due to me,
And heaven itself, by heritage _in fee_."
_Ib._ C. vii. st. 15.

And in the first of these two passages from the "Faerie Queene," we have
two words, "seized" and "estate," intelligently and correctly used
in their purely legal sense, as Shakespeare himself uses them in the
following passages, which our Chief Justice and our barrister have both
passed by, as, indeed, they have passed many others equally worthy of
notice:-