“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact: 
* * * * *
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Sc. 1.

We would not protract this finding of faults, and will only add, that, when his Lordship says, (p. 116,) that Henry V. “astonished the world with his universal wisdom” he entirely overlooks the fact, that wisdom is a faculty of the mind, or, rather, a mode of intellectual action, of which universality can no more be predicated than of folly, or of honesty, or of muscular strength; and that it is not knowledge, or at all like knowledge; which, indeed, is often acquired in a very remarkable degree by persons eminent for unwisdom.  Lord Campbell might as well have said that Henry V. astonished the world with his universal prowess in the battle-field.

The censure to which Mr. Rushton’s pamphlet is occasionally open in regard to style may properly be averted by the modesty of its tone and its unpretending character.

But to pass from the manner to the matter of the learned gentlemen who appear on behalf of Malone’s theory.  Lord Campbell, after stating, in the introductory part of his letter, that in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Twelfth Night,” “Julius Caesar,” “Cymbeline,” “Timon of Athens,” “The Tempest,” “King Richard II.,” “King Henry V.,” “King Henry VI., Part I.,” “King Henry VI., Part III.,” “King Richard III.,” “King Henry VIII.,” “Pericles,” and “Titus Andronicus,”—­fourteen of the thirty-seven dramas generally attributed to Shakespeare,—­he finds “nothing that fairly bears upon this controversy,” goes on to produce from the remaining plays, seriatim, such passages as in his judgment do bear upon the question, and to remark upon them, thus isolated and disconnected from each other.  Mr. Rushton is more methodic and logical.  He does not merely quote or cite all the passages which he has noticed in which legal terms occur, but brings together all such as contain the same terms or refer to kindred proceedings or instruments; and he thus presents his case with much more compactness and consequent strength than results from Lord Campbell’s loose and unmethodical mode of treating the subject.  We can arrive at the merits of the case on either presentation only by an examination of some of the more important of the passages cited.

Lord Campbell, as we have just seen, mentions “Henry VIII.” as one of the fourteen plays in which he has found nothing which relates to the question in hand; but Mr. Rushton opens his batteries with the following passage from the very play just named; and to most readers it will seem a bomb of the largest dimensions, sent right into the citadel of his opponents:—­