tunes and herself,--yet they were no
common pasture.

[Footnote F: Falstaff, for instance, speaks of "the wearing out of six
fashions, which is four terms or two actions."]

Here, then, is Shakespeare using the technical language of conveyancers
in his earliest works, and before he had had much opportunity to
haunt the courts of law in London, even could he have made such legal
acquirements in those schools. We find, too, that he uses law-terms in
general with frequency notably greater--in an excess of three or four
to one--than any of the other playwrights of his day, when so many
playwrights were or had been Noverints or of the Inns of Court; that
this excess is not observable with regard to his use of the vocabulary
peculiar to any other occupation or profession, even that of the actor,
which we know that he practised for many years; but that, on the
contrary, although he uses other technical language correctly, he avails
himself of that of any single art of occupation with great rarity,
and only upon special occasions. Lord Campbell remarks, as to the
correctness with which Shakespeare uses legal phrases,--and this is a
point upon which his Lordship speaks with authority,--that he is amazed
"by the accuracy and propriety with which they are introduced," and in
another place adds, that Shakespeare "uniformly lays down good law"; and
it is not necessary to be a Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench to know
that his Lordship is fully justified in assuring us that "there is
nothing [of the kind (?)] so dangerous as for one not of the craft to
tamper with our free-masonry." Remembering, then, that genius, though
it reveals general and even particular truths, and facilitates all
acquirement, does not impart facts or the knowledge of technical terms,
in what manner can we answer or set aside the question that we have
partly stated before,--How did it happen, that, in an age when it was
a common practice for young attorneys and barristers to leave their
profession and take to writing plays and poems, one playwright left upon
his works a stronger, clearer, sharper legal stamp than we can detect
upon those of any other, and that he used the very peculiar and, to a
layman, incomprehensible language of the law of real property, as it
then existed, in his very earliest plays, written soon after he, a raw,
rustic youth, bred in a retired village, arrived in London? How did
it happen that this playwright fell into the use of that te