let us see
if he is peculiar even in this crowding of many law-terms into a single
brief passage. We turn to the very play open at our hand, from which
we have quoted before, (and which, by the way, we have not selected as
exceptional in this regard,) "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage," and
find the following passage in Act V.:--

"_Doctor_. Now, Sir, from this your _oath and bond,_
Faith's pledge and _seal_ of conscience, you have run,
Broken all _contracts_, and _forfeiture_
Justice hath now in _suit_ against your soul:
Angels are made the _jurors_, who are _witnesses_
Unto the _oath_ you took; and God himself,
Maker of marriage, He that hath _seal'd the deed_,
As a firm _lease_ unto you during life,
_Sits now as Judge_ of your transgression:
The world _informs against you_ with this voice.--
If such sins reign, what mortals can rejoice?
_Scarborow_. What then ensues to me?
_Doctor_. A heavy _doom_, whose _execution's_
Now _served upon_ your conscience," etc.
p. 91, D.O.P., Ed. 1825.

Indeed, the hunting of a metaphor or a conceit into the ground is a
fault characteristic of Elizabethan literature, and one from which
Shakespeare's boldness, no less than his genius, was required to save
him; and we have seen already how common was the figurative use of
law-phrases among the poets and dramatists of his period. Hamlet's
speech and the Forty-sixth Sonnet cannot, therefore, be accepted as
evidence of his attorneyship, except in so far as they and like passages
may be regarded as giving some support to the opinion that Shakespeare
was but one of many in his time who abandoned law for letters.

For we object not so much to the conclusion at which Lord Campbell
arrives as to his mode of arriving at it. His method of investigation,
which is no method at all, but the mere noting of passages in the order
in which he found them in looking through Shakespeare's works, is the
rudest and least intelligent that could have been adopted; and his
inference, that, because Shakespeare makes Jack Cade lament that the
skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, and affirm that it is
not the bee, but the bee's wax, that stings, therefore he must have been
employed to write deeds on parchment and append wax to them in the form
of seals, is a fair specimen both of the acuteness and the logic which
his Lordship displays in this his latest effort to unite Law and
Literature.

There are, however, ver