technicality and of their legal purport.  This is not quite in the proportion of three to each of his thirty-seven plays; and if we reckon his sonnets and poems according to their lines, (and both Mr. Rushton and Lord Campbell cite from them,) the proportion falls to considerably less than three.  But Malone’s twenty-four instances are of nearly as much value in the consideration of the question as Lord Campbell’s and Mr. Rushton’s hundred; for the latter gentlemen have added little to the strength, though considerably to the number, of the array on the affirmative side of the point in dispute; and we have seen, that, of the law-phrases cited by them from Shakespeare’s pages, the most recondite, as well as the most common and simple, are to be found in the works of the Chroniclers, whose very language Shakespeare used, and in those of the playwrights his contemporaries.

Our new advocates of the old cause, however, quote two passages which, from the freedom with which law-phrases are scattered through them, it is worth while to reproduce here.  The first is the well-known speech in the grave-digging scene of “Hamlet":—­

“Ham.  There’s another:  Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?  Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave, now, to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery?  Humph!  This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries:  Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones, too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures?  The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more? ha?”—­Act v.  Sc. 1.

The second is the following Sonnet, (No. 46,) not only the language, but the very fundamental conceit of which, it will be seen, is purely legal:—­

  “Mine Eye and Heart are at a mortal war
  How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
  Mine Eye my Heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
  My Heart mine Eye the freedom of that right. 
  My Heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie
  (A closet never pierc’d with crystal eyes);
  But the defendant doth that plea deny,
  And says in him thy fair appearance lies. 
  To ’cide this title is impanelled
  A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the Heart,
  And by their verdict is determined
  The clear Eye’s moiety, and the dear Heart’s part;
  As thus:  Mine Eye’s due is thine outward part,
  And my Heart’s right, thine inward love of heart.”