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. There are, however, very considerable grounds for the opinion that Shakespeare had more than a layman's acquaintance with the technical language of the law. For it must be admitted, in the first place, that he exhibits a remarkable acquaintance with it. That other playwrights and poets of his day manifest a like familiarity (as we have seen they do) precludes us, indeed, from regarding the mere occurrence of law-terms in his works as indications of early training proper to him alone. But they who, on the strength of the not unfrequent occurrence of legal phrases in many of the plays and much of the poetry of the Elizabethan period, would maintain that Shakespeare's use of them furnishes no basis for the opinion that he acquired his knowledge of them professionally, must also assume and support the position, that, in the case of contemporary dramatists and poets, this use of the technical language of conveyancing and pleading also indicates no more than an ordinary acquaintance with it, and that, in comparing his works with theirs in this regard, we may assume the latter to have been produced by men who had no professional acquaintance with the law; because, if they had such professional acquaintance with legal phraseology, its appearance in their works as well as in Shakespeare's would manifestly strengthen rather than invalidate the conclusion, that his familiarity with it was acquired as they acquired theirs. This position is, to say the least, a very difficult one to maintain, and one which any considerate student of Elizabethan literature would be very unwilling to assume. For our ignorance of the personal life of Shakespeare is remarkable only because he was Shakespeare; and we know little, if any, more about the greater number of his literary contemporaries than we do about him. It cannot even be safely presumed, for instance, that George Wilkins, the author of the law-besprinkled passage just above quoted from the "Miseries of Enforced Marriage," was not a practising attorney or barrister before or even at the time when he wrote that play. On the contrary, it is extremely probable, nay, quite certain, that he and many