It would seem, indeed, as if passages like these must be received as evidence that Shakespeare had more familiarity with legal phraseology, if not a greater knowledge of it, than could have been acquired except by habitual use in the course of professional occupation.  But 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.