One reason for the regarding of Nash’s sneer as especially directed against Shakespeare is the occurrence in it of the phrase, “whole Hamlets,—­I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches,” which has been looked upon as an allusion to Shakespeare’s great tragedy.  But the earliest edition of “Hamlet” known was published in 1603, and even this is an imperfect and surreptitiously obtained copy of an early sketch of the play.  That Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, when he was but twenty-two years old, is improbable to the verge of impossibility; and Nash’s allusion, if, indeed, he meant a punning sneer at a play, (which is not certain.) was, doubtless, to an old lost version of the Danish tragedy upon which Shakespeare built his “Hamlet.”

We have, then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of Shakespeare’s entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, but is strongly confirmed by the notably frequent occurrence of legal phrases in the dramatic literature of that age.

But the question, then, arises,—­and it is one which, under the circumstances, must be answered,—­To what must we attribute the fact, that, of all the plays that have come down to us, written between 1580 and 1620, Shakespeare’s are most noteworthy in this respect?  For it is true, that, among all the dramatic writers of that period, whose works have survived, not one uses the phraseology of the law with the frequency, the freedom, and the correctness of Shakespeare.  Beaumont, for instance, was a younger son of a Judge of the Common Pleas, and, following the common routine that we have noticed, after leaving the University, became an Inns-of-Court man, but soon abandoned law for literature; his friend and associate, Fletcher, was the son of a bishop, but had an uncle who was a lawyer and a diplomatist, and is himself believed to have been of the Inns of Court.  Rich gleanings of law-terms might, therefore, be expected from the plays written by these dramatists; yet it may safely be asserted, that from Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays at least twice as many passages marked by legal phraseology might be produced, as from the fifty-four written by Beaumont and Fletcher, together or alone! a fact the great significance of which is heightened by another,—­that it is only the vocabulary of the law to the use of which Shakespeare exhibits this proclivity.  He avails himself, it is true, of the peculiar language of the physician, the divine, the husbandman, the soldier, and the sailor; but he uses these only on very rare occasions, by way of description, comparison, or illustration, when something in the scene or the subject in hand suggests them.  But the technical language of the