chnical
phraseology, the proper employment of which, more than any other,
demands special training, and that he availed himself of it with
apparent unconsciousness, not only so much oftener than any of his
contemporaries, but with such exact knowledge, that one who has passed
a long life in the professional employment of it, speaking as it
were officially from the eminent position which he has won,--Lord
Campbell,--declares, that,

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the
law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law,
lavishly as he propounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of
exceptions, nor writ of error"?

Must we believe, that the man, who, among all the lawyer-playwrights of
his day, showed,--not, be it noticed, (as we are at present regarding
his works,) the profoundest knowledge of the great principles of law and
equity, although he did that too,--but the most complete mastery of
the technical phrases, the jargon, of the law and of its most abstruse
branch,--that relating to real estate,--and who used it very much the
oftenest of them all, and with an air of as entire unconsciousness as
if it were a part of the language of his daily life, making no mistakes
that can be detected by a learned professional critic,--must we believe
that this man was distinguished among those play-writing lawyers, not
only by his genius, but his _lack_ of particular acquaintance with the
law? Or shall we rather believe that the son of the High Bailiff of
Stratford, whose father was well-to-do in the world, and who was a
somewhat clever lad and ambitious withal, was allowed to commence his
studies for a profession for which his cleverness fitted him and by
which he might reasonably hope to rise at least to moderate wealth and
distinction, and that he continued these studies until his father's
loss of property, aided, perhaps, by some of those acts of youthful
indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull ones sometimes will
commit, threw him upon his own resources,--and that then, having
townsmen, perhaps fellow-students and playfellows, among the actors in
London, and having used his pen, as we may be sure he had, for other
purposes than engrossing and drawing precedents, he, like so many others
of his time, left his trade of Noverint and went up to the metropolis to
busy himself with endeavors of art? One of these conclusions is in the
face of reason, probability, a