the thirty-second chapter of Genesis." Why
was not such a pundit William Cantuar,
instead of plain Mr. W. Shakespeare,
Solicitor?

Light from Liverpool proves him a lawyer,
and shows great legal acumen in so doing.
"Be the attorney of my love to her," says
King Richard the Third. Stanley says, " I,
by attorney, bless thee from thy mother."
"I am still attorney'd at your service," says
the Duke in Measure for Measure, and says
Shakespeare in this pamphlet. " Why," asks
the Lancashire illuminator, " why should
Shakespeare make use of law terms in
preference to the technical terms of the medical,
clerical, or any other profession? " But then
M.A. proves him a divine, and I know him
to have been a water-doctor, though there
certainly are passages about spermaceti,
hellebore, and other drugs, which countenance
a suspicion that he also kept a
chemist's shop. " Why," asks the Northern
Light, " should Hamlet, in his reflections on
a skull, suppose that it belonged to a lawyer,
in preference to a doctor or divine?"
Observe the number of law terms in that speech
over the skull. Quiddets, quillets, cases,
tenures, action of battery, statutes,
recognisances, fines, double vouchers, recoveries,
purchases, double purchases, conveyance, and
to contain all, finally, the lawyer's Box.
"Shakespeare," says the corruscator,
"displays his acquaintance with the custom of
conveyancing lawyers in this passage: 'The
very conveyance of his lands will hardly lie
in this box; and must the inheritor himself
have no more? ' Why " he asks, " should
Hamlet compare the grave to a box? Not
because there is any resemblance between a
box and a grave, but because conveyancers
and attorneys keep their deeds in wood or
tin boxes." True it is that the doctors put
their pills in boxes, but then had Shakespeare
been of the medical profession, we shall be
told, the speech ought to have run something
thus: " Where be his Turkey rhubarb now,
his crab's eyes, his castor, his hartshorns, 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 the
dose must not be repeated? This fellow
might in's time be a buyer of spatulas," &c.
&c. Shakespeare, in fact, must have been a
limb of the law, or he would never have sung
to his beloved in a sonnet:

I myself am mortgaged to thy will,

Or gone on with such lines as

He learn'd but surety-like, to write for me,
Under that bond that him. as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, &c.

As a sonnetteer, too, he says he will be
contented when

that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,

and he makes Hamlet observe how "this
fell sergeant death is strict in arrest," referring
here to the sergeant-at-arms or mace.

"How now," cries Pandarus in Troilus
and Cressida, "How now, a kiss in fee-farm."
Who but a lawyer would have talked about
kissing in fee-farm? Again, even in Venus
and Adonis, he can't get out of the office and
its associations, but makes a lover say, " Set
thy seal manual on my wax-red lips." He
stains even the face of Desdemona with his
office ink. Desdemona says in the third
scene of the third act of Othello:

For thy solicitor shall rather die
Than give thy cause away.

Note how well Shakespeare knew the
letter of the law about a præmunire when,
in Henry the Eighth, Suffolk tells the Lord
Cardinal that his doings have " fallen into
the compass of a præmunire," and that a
writ is therefore to be sued against him:

To forfeit all your goods, lands, tenements,
Chattels, and whatsoever, and to be
Out of the king's protection.

The statute itself says "that if any purchase
or pursue in the Court of Rome or elsewhere,
any translation process, sentence of excommunication,
bulls, instruments, &c., which
touch the king; or if any do bring them
within the realm, or receive them, they shall
be put out of the king's protection, and their
lands, tenements, goods and chattels forfeited
to the king."

Othello undertakes to show " what doings,
what charms, what conjuration," &c., in
accordance, of course, with the eighth cap.,
thirty-third Henry the Eighth, which enacts,
"It shall be felony to practice, or cause to be
practiced, conjuration, witchcraft, &c., to
provoke any person to unlawful love."

Mrs. Page says of Falstaff, " If the Devil
have him not in fee-simple, with fine and
recovery, he will never, I think, in the way
of waste, attempt us again." " Tenant in
fee-simple," in the language of Littleton, "is
he which hath lands or tenements to hold to
his or to his heirs for ever; and fine and
recovery was formerly the strongest assurance
known to English law." Not to quote other
instances of the mention of fee-simple in
Shakespeare's works, I may take from the
Northern Light the speech of Parolles: "For
a quart d'écu he will sell the fee-simple of
his salvation, the inheritance of it; and cut
the entail from all remainders, and a
perpetual succession for it perpetually." Before
passing from Shakespearean remainders to his
frequent mention and accurate knowledge of
the meaning of reversion, we should read
what is here told us by way of elucidation:
"The difference between a remainder and a
reversion is, that a remainder is something
limited over to a third person on the creation
of an estate less than that which the granter
has; whilst a reversion is that part which
remains in the grantor himself, on such grant