"He was the prophet of geology," says Fullom, "before it found an exponent in Werner;" ```"O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate; ```And see the revolution of the times ```Make mountains level, and the continent ```(Weary of solid firmness) melt itself ```Into the sea! and, other times, to see ```The beechy girdle of the ocean ```Too wide for Neptune's hips." ** And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms of Hunt, Jenkins and Stratford school! And, Mr. Malone believed, had never even gone so far into the classics as to have read Tacitus! *** * "History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with New Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullom, London: Saunders, Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864. ** "King Henry IV.," Part II., Act 3, Scene i. *** See ante, p. 88. What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous {214}Stratford school, "two terms," of which--between his poaching and his beer-bouting--were all the schooling William Shakespeare ever had, according to all bis biographies. (We say, all he ever had, because his father was so illiterate that he signed every thing with a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of William's family; and the boy William was too busy at skylarking--according to those who knew him--to have had much opportunity of private instruction at the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements been adequate.) Were the theory and practice of the common law taught there? "Legal phrases flow from his pen," says Mr. Grant White, "as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.... This conveyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been picked up by hanging around the courts in London, two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. And, besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early plays, written in his first Loudon years, as in those produced at a later period." * And not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of that mighty and abstruse science, the law of England," is he perfect. A chief justice of England has declared that "while novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." ** * Memoir," p. 47. And see "Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" By H. T-------. London: Longmans, Green, Reader A Dyer, 1871. ** "Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p. 108. And see "Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Rushton. London, 1858.