But what shall we think of the acumen and the judgment of a Chief Justice, a man of letters, and a man of the world, who brings forward such passages as the following as part of the evidence bearing upon the question of Shakespeare’s legal acquirements?—­

  “Come; fear not you; good counsellors lack
  no clients.”
  Measure for Measure.  Act i.  Sc. 2.

  “One that before the judgement carries poor
  souls to hell.”
  Comedy of Errors.  Act iv.  Sc. 2.

  “Well, Time is the old Justice that examines
  all such offenders,—­and let Time try.”
  As You Like It.  Act iv.  Sc. 1.

  “And that old common arbitrator, Time.”
  Troilus and Cressida.  Act iv.  Sc. 5.

  “No cock of mine; you crow too like a craven.”
  Taming of the Shrew.  Act ii.  Sc. 1.

  “Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple.”
  Hamlet.  Act iv.  Sc. 4.

By which last line, according to Lord Campbell, (p. 55,) “Shakespeare shows that he was acquainted with the law for regulating ’trials by battle’”!

But to proceed with the passages quoted in evidence:—­

“Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?  Some say, the bee stings:  but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.”—­2 Henry VI.  Act vi.  Sc. 2.

Upon citing which, his Lordship exclaims,—­

“Surely Shakespeare must have been employed to write deeds on parchment in courthand, and to apply the wax to them in the form of seals.  One does not understand how he should, on any other theory of his bringing-up, have been acquainted with these details”!

One does not; but we submit to the court, that, if two were to lay their heads together after the manner of Sydney Smith’s vestrymen, they might bring it about.

In aid of his Lordship’s further studies, we make the following suggestion.  He doubtless knows that one of the earliest among our small stock of traditions about Shakespeare is that recorded by Aubrey as being derived from Stratford authority, that his father was a butcher, and that “when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he kill’d a calfe, he wold do it in a high style, and make a speech.”  When his Lordship considers this old tradition in connection with the following passage in one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays,—­

“Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh, And sees fast by a butcher with an axe, But will suspect ’twas he that made the slaughter,”—­

2 Henry VI. Act iii.  Sc. 2.