r at least would not have doubted, had he in the course of
his literary leisure fallen upon the following passage in "Wit Without
Money" (1630):--

"_Val_ Mark me, widows
Are long _extents_ in law upon men's livings,
Upon their bodies' winding-sheets; they that enjoy 'em
Lie but with dead men's monuments, and beget
Only their own ill epitaphs."
Act ii. Sc. 2.

George Wilkins, too, the obscure author of "The Miseries of Enforced
Marriage," uses the term with as full an understanding, though not with
so feeling an expression or so scandalous an illustration of it, in the
following passage from the fifth act of that play, which was produced
about 1605 or 1606:--

"They are usurers; they come yawning for money; and the sheriff with
them is come to serve an _extent_ upon your land, and then seize your
body by force of execution."

Another seemingly recondite law-phrase used by Shakespeare, which Lord
Campbell passes entirely by, though Mr. Rushton quotes three instances
of it, is "taken with the manner." This has nothing to do with good
manners or ill manners; but, in the words of the old law-book before
cited,--

--"is when a theefe hath stollen and is followed with hue and crie and
taken, having that found about him which he stole;--that is called ye
maynour. And so we commonly use to saye, when wee finde one doing of an
unlawful act, that we tooke him with the maynour or manner."

_Termes de la Ley_, 1595, fol. 126, _b_.

Shakespeare, therefore, uses the phrase with perfect understanding, when
he makes Prince Hal say to Bardolph,--

"O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen
years ago, and wert _taken with the manner_,
and ever since thou hast blush'd extempore."
1 _Henry IV_.Act ii, Sc. 4.

But so Fletcher uses the same phrase, and as correctly, when he makes
Perez say to Estefania, in "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,"--

"How like a sheep-biting rogue, _taken i' the manner_,
And ready for the halter, dost thou look
now!"--Act v. Sc. 4.

But both Fletcher and Shakespeare, in their use of this phrase, unusual
as it now seems to us, have only exemplified the custom referred to by
our contemporary legal authority,--"And so we _commonly use to saye_,
when wee finde one doing of an unlawfull act, that we tooke him with the
maynour"; though this must doubtless be understood to refer to persons
of a certain degree of education and knowledge of the world.

It seems, then, that the a