“If Cupid
  Shoot arrows of that weight, I’ll swear devoutly
  H’as sued his livery and is no more a boy.” 
  FLETCHER’S Woman’s Prize, Act ii.  Sc. 1.

And this, from the works of a divine:—­

  “Our little Cupid hath sued livery
  And is no more in his minority.” 
  DONNE’S Eclogues, 1613.

Spenser, too, uses the phrase figuratively in another sense, in the following passage,—­which may be one of those which Chalmers had in his eye, when, according to Lord Campbell, he “first suggested” that Shakespeare was once an attorney’s clerk:—­

“She gladly did of that same Babe accept, As of her owne by liverey and seisin; And having over it a litle wept, She bore it thence, and ever as her owne it kept.” Faerie Queene, B. VI.  C. iv. st. 37.

So, for an instance of the phrase “fee,” which Lord Campbell notices as one of those expressions and allusions which “crop out” in “Hamlet,” “showing the substratum of law in the author’s mind,”—­

  “We go to gain a little patch of ground,
  That hath in it no profit but the name. 
  To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
  Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
  A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee,”—­
  Act iv.  Sc. 2.

and of which Mr. Rushton quotes several instances in its fuller form, “fee simple,”—­we have but to turn back a few stanzas in this same canto of the “Faerie Queene,” to find one in which the term is used with the completest apprehension of its meaning:—­

“So is my lord now seiz’d of all the land, As in his fee, with peaceable estate, And quietly doth hold it in his hand, Ne any dares with him for it debate.” Ib. st. 30.

And in the next canto:—­

  “Of which the greatest part is due to me,
  And heaven itself, by heritage in fee.”
  Ib. C. vii. st. 15.

And in the first of these two passages from the “Faerie Queene,” we have two words, “seized” and “estate,” intelligently and correctly used in their purely legal sense, as Shakespeare himself uses them in the following passages, which our Chief Justice and our barrister have both passed by, as, indeed, they have passed many others equally worthy of notice:—­

  “Did forfeit with his life all those his lands
  Which he stood seiz’d of to the conqueror.”
  Hamlet, Act i.  Sc. 1.

  “The terms of our estate may not endure
  Hazard so near us,” etc.—­Ib.  Act iii.  Sc. 3.

Among the most important passages cited by both our authors is one that every reader of Shakespeare will recollect, when it is mentioned to him,—­Hamlet’s speech over the skull in the grave-digging scene.  But although this speech is remarkable for the number of law-terms used in it, only one of them seems to evince any recondite knowledge of the law.  This is the word “statutes,” in the following sentence:—­