Must we believe, that the man, who, among all the lawyer-playwrights of his day, showed,—­not, be it noticed, (as we are at present regarding his works,) the profoundest knowledge of the great principles of law and equity, although he did that too,—­but the most complete mastery of the technical phrases, the jargon, of the law and of its most abstruse branch,—­that relating to real estate,—­and who used it very much the oftenest of them all, and with an air of as entire unconsciousness as if it were a part of the language of his daily life, making no mistakes that can be detected by a learned professional critic,—­must we believe that this man was distinguished among those play-writing lawyers, not only by his genius, but his lack of particular acquaintance with the law?  Or shall we rather believe that the son of the High Bailiff of Stratford, whose father was well-to-do in the world, and who was a somewhat clever lad and ambitious withal, was allowed to commence his studies for a profession for which his cleverness fitted him and by which he might reasonably hope to rise at least to moderate wealth and distinction, and that he continued these studies until his father’s loss of property, aided, perhaps, by some of those acts of youthful indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull ones sometimes will commit, threw him upon his own resources,—­and that then, having townsmen, perhaps fellow-students and playfellows, among the actors in London, and having used his pen, as we may be sure he had, for other purposes than engrossing and drawing precedents, he, like so many others of his time, left his trade of Noverint and went up to the metropolis to busy himself with endeavors of art?  One of these conclusions is in the face of reason, probability, and fact; the other in accordance with them all.

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But of how little real importance is it to establish the bare fact, that Shakespeare was an attorney’s clerk before he was an actor!  Suppose it proved, beyond a doubt,—­what have we learned?  Nothing peculiar to Shakespeare; but merely what was equally true of thousands of other young men, his contemporaries, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those of antecedent and succeeding generations.  It has a naked material relation to the other fact, that he uses legal phrases oftener than any other dramatist or poet; but with his plastic power over those grotesque and rugged modes of speech it has nought to do whatever.  That was his inborn mastery.  Legal phrases did nothing for him; but he much for them.  Chance cast their uncouth forms around him, and the golden overflow from the furnace of his glowing thought fell upon them, glorifying and enshielding them forever.  It would have been the same with the lumber of any other craft; it was the same with that of many others,—­the difference being only of quantity, and not of kind.  How, then, would the certainty that he had been bred to the law