“How like a sheep-biting rogue, taken i’ the manner,
  And ready for the halter, dost thou look
  now!”—­Act v.  Sc. 4.

But both Fletcher and Shakespeare, in their use of this phrase, unusual as it now seems to us, have only exemplified the custom referred to by our contemporary legal authority,—­“And so we commonly use to saye, when wee finde one doing of an unlawfull act, that we tooke him with the maynour”; though this must doubtless be understood to refer to persons of a certain degree of education and knowledge of the world.

It seems, then, that the application of legal phraseology to the ordinary affairs of life was more common two hundred and fifty years ago than now; though even now-a-days it is much more generally used in the rural districts than persons who have not lived in them would suppose.  There law shares with agriculture the function of providing those phrases of common conversation which, used figuratively at first, and often with poetic feeling, soon pass into mere thought-saving formulas of speech, and which in large cities are chiefly drawn from trade and politics.  And if in the use of the law-terms upon which we have remarked, which are the more especially technical and remote from the language of unprofessional life among all those which occur in Shakespeare’s works, he was not singular, but, as we have seen, availed himself only of a knowledge which other contemporary poets and playwrights possessed, how much more easily might we show that those commoner legal words and phrases, to remarks upon Shakespeare’s use of which both the books before us (and especially Lord Campbell’s) are mainly devoted, “judgment,” “fine,” “these presents,” “testament,” “attorney,” “arbitrator,” “fees,” “bond,” “lease,” “pleading,” “arrest,” “session,” “mortgage,” “vouchers,” “indentures,” “assault,” “battery,” “dower,” “covenant,” “distrain,” “bail,” “non-suit,” etc., etc., etc.,—­words which everybody understands,—­are scattered through all the literature of Shakespeare’s time, and, indeed, of all time since there were courts and suits at law!

Many of the passages which Lord Campbell cites as evidence of Shakespeare’s “legal acquirements” excite only a smile at the self-delusion of the critic who could regard them for a moment in that light.  For instance, these lines in that most exquisite song in “Measure for Measure;”—­“Take, oh, take those lips away,”—­

  “But my kisses bring again
  Seals of love, but seal’d in vain";—­

and these from “Venus and Adonis,”—­

  “Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted,
  What bargains may I make, still to be sealing!”—­

to which Mr. Rushton adds from “Hamlet,”—­

  “A combination and a form, indeed,
  Where every god did seem to set his seal.”

Act iii.  Sc. 4.

  “Now must your conscience my acquittance
  seal.”—­Act iv.  Sc. 7.