“Mr. Malone places the aspiring poet ’in the office of some country attorney, or the seneschal of some manor court’; and for this violation of probability he produces many passages from his dramas to evince Shakespeare’s technical skill in the forms of law. ...But was it not the practice of the times, for other makers, like the bees tolling from every flower the virtuous sweets, to gather from the thistles of the law the sweetest honey?  Does not Spenser gather many a metaphor from these weeds, that are most apt to grow in fattest soil?  Has not Spenser his law-terms:  his capias, defeasance, and duresse; his emparlance; his enure, essoyn, and escheat; his folkmote, forestall and gage; his livery and seasin, wage and waif?  It will be said, however, that, whatever the learning of Spenser may have gleaned, the law-books of that age were impervious to the illiterature of Shakespeare.  No:  such an intellect, when employed on the drudgery of a wool-stapler, who had been high-bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, might have derived all that was necessary from a very few books; from Totell’s ‘Presidents,’ 1572; from Pulton’s ‘Statutes,’ 1578; and from the ‘Lawier’s Logike,’ 1588.  It is one of the axioms of the ‘Flores Regii,’ that, To answer an improbable imagination is to fight against a vanishing shadow.”—­p. 553.

And again, in his “Supplemental Apology,” etc., 1799, Chalmers remarks,—­

“The biographers, without adequate proofs, have bound Shakespeare an apprentice to some country attorney; as Mr. Malone has sent him without sufficient warrant to the desk of some seneschal of a county court:  but these are obscurities that require other lights than conjecture and assertion, which, by proving nothing, only establish disbelief.”—­p. 226.

So much for Chalmers’s having “first suggested” the theory, of which Lord Campbell has undertaken the support.  Surely his Lordship must have been verifying Rosalind’s assertion, that lawyers sleep between term and term, or else he is guilty of having loosely made a direct assertion in regard to a subject upon which he had not taken the trouble to inform himself; although he professes (p. 10) to have “read nearly all that has been written on Shakespeare’s ante-Londinensian life, and carefully examined his writings with a view to obtain internal evidence as to his education and breeding.”

One exhibition of his Lordship’s inaccuracy is surprising.  Commenting upon Falstaff’s threat, “Woe to my Lord Chief Justice!” (2d Henry IV., Act V., Sc. 4,) he remarks, (p. 73,) “Sir W. Gascoigne was continued as Lord Chief Justice in the new reign; but, according to law and custom, he was removable, and he no doubt expected to be removed, from his office.”  Lord Campbell has yet to rival the fifth wife of the missionary who wrote the lives of “her predecessors”;