law runs from his pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.  The word “purchase,” for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire by giving value, in law applies to all legal modes of obtaining property, except inheritance of descent.  And the word in this peculiar and most technical sense occurs five times in Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, but only in a single passage (if our memory and Mr. Dyce’s notes serve us) in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.  Equal, or greater, is the comparative frequency with which Shakespeare uses other legal phrases; and much wider is the disparity, in this regard, between him and the other dramatic writers of his whole period,—­Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lilly, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Ford, Webster, Massinger, and the undistinguished crowd.

These facts dispose in great measure of the plausible suggestion, which has been made,—­that, as the courts of law in Shakespeare’s time occupied public attention much more than they do at present, they having then regulated “the season,” as the sittings of Parliament (not then frequent or stated) do now,[F] they would naturally be frequented by the restless, inquiring spirits of the time, Shakespeare among them, and that there he and his fellow-dramatists picked up the law-phrases which they wove into their plays and poems.  But if this view of the case were the correct one, we should not find that disparity in the use of legal phrases which we have just remarked.  Shakespeare’s genius would manifest itself in the superior effect with which he used knowledge acquired in this manner; but his genius would not have led him to choose the dry and affected phraseology of the law as the vehicle of his flowing thought, and to use it so much oftener than any other of the numerous dramatists of his time, to all of whom the courts were as open as to him.  And the suggestion which we are now considering fails in two other most important respects.  For we do not find either that Shakespeare’s use of legal phrases increased with his opportunities of frequenting the courts of law, or that the law-phrases, his use of which is most noteworthy and of most importance in the consideration of the question before us, are those which he would have heard oftenest in the course of the ordinary business of the courts in his day.  To look at the latter point first,—­the law-terms used by Shakespeare are generally not those which he would have heard in ordinary trials at nisi prius or before the King’s Bench, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, “fine and recovery,” “statutes,” “purchase,” “indenture,” “tenure,” “double voucher,” “fee simple,” “fee farm,” “remainder,” “reversion,” “dower,” “forfeiture,” etc., etc.; and it is important to remember that suits about the title to real estate are very much rarer in England than they are with us, and in England were very much rarer in Shakespeare’s time than they