and humor travels in legal grooves; that legal language once adopted is exhausted; that legal terms are everywhere preferred as standards of comparison by a writer whose resources in every other treasury of speech were vast beyond computation "with things which nothing but his own despotic imagination could have brought into relevancy"; and who certainly, therefore, did not need to leave the lay tongue to search in technical speech for words wherein to express himself. Moreover, that not only is this legal groove traversed and retraversed unconsciously and unintentionally, but the author, on revising his own manuscript for a new edition, added explanations of statements that none but a lawyer would have perceived to have needed explanation at all: recast sentences not legal over into legal form, and everywhere kept his glowing rhetoric within the very letter and spirit of Tudor forms and precedents.

Coleridge has remarked "that a young author's first works almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits." He might have said with equal correctness that no author's works can ever entirely hide his former pursuits, betrayed by the prejudices, affections, antipathies or affectations of his style. But Mr. Davis goes further. And says, "Shakespeare had a lawyer's conservatism. He respected the established order of things. He chisels the republican Brutus in cold and marble beauty, but paints with beams of sunlight the greatness, bravery, and generosity of imperial Cæsar. Coriolanus is the impersonation of patrician contempt for popular rights. Shakespeare passes unnoticed the causes which led to Cade's insurrection because he

cares not for them-causes so just that honorable terms were exacted by the insurgents. His portrait of Joan of Arc, the virgin mother of French nationality, who raised it to glory because the people believed in her, is a great offense. There is nowhere a hint of sympathy with personal rights as against the sovereign, nor with parliament, then first assuming its protective attitude toward the English people, nor with the few judges who, like Coke, showed a glorious obstinacy in their resistance to the prerogative. In all his works there is not one direct word for liberty of speech, thought, religion,-those rights which in his age were the very seeds of time, into which his eye, of all men's, could best look to see which grain would grow and which would not."

Moreover, this same author, even when his wit ran at hap-hazard into puns, directed these puns into legal lines. "Cade makes a bestial pun, suggested by tenancy in capite, and by an infernal. privilege of stupration, which is one of the recondite curiosities of the law. Dromio asserts that there is no time for a bald man to recover his hair. This having been written, the law phrase suggested itself, and he was asked whether he might not do it by fine and recovery, and this suggested the efficiency of that proceeding to bar heirs; and this started the conceit that thus the lost hair of another man would be recovered. Again, in the love-making, a 'quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart, is impaneled to decide the question of title to the visage of the beloved one between the heart and the eye, where the defendant denies the plea, and the verdict is a moiety to each. The word employed

becomes suggestive of other words, or of a legal principle, and these are at once used so fully that their powers are exhausted. In one scene the lover, wishing a kiss, prays for a grant of pasture on his mistress's lips. This suggests the law of common of pasture, and she replies that her lips. are no common. This suggests the distinction between tenancy in common and tenancy in severalty, the lips being several, and she adds, "though several they be."

In other words, the legalism is structural; could not be uprooted without taking the thought, blood, rhetoric and continuity of the whole text along with it. It comes "from the mouth of every personage; from the queen; from the child; from the Merry Wives of Windsor; from the Egyptian fervor of Cleopatra; from the love-sick Paphian goddess; from violated Lucrece; from Lear, Hamlet and Othello; from Shakespeare himself, soliloquizing in his sonnets; from Dogberry and Prospero; from riotous Falstaff and melancholy Jacques. Shakespeare utters it at all times as standard coin, no matter when or in what mint stamped. These emblems of his industry are woven into his style like the bees into the imperial purple of Napoleon's coronation robes."

What was the necessity? Ben Jonson was proud of borrowing technical and classical words; but he only made his work dreary and stilted. Besides, the author of the Shakespeare plays needed borrow of nobody. The answer is that he borrowed not anything of anybody, but spoke the speech he was bred to. But Mr. Davis goes yet further, and shows how the writer of these plays deliberately

remodeled things not legally expressed, until they satisfied that legal mind of his, and were so dressed in judicial garb that any queen's counsel might use them for a brief. For example, the first quarto of "Hamlet" was printed in 1603. In it were the lines:

"Who by a seale compact, well ratified by law

And heraldrie, did forfeit with his life all those
His lands which he stood seized of by the conqueror,
Against the which a moiety competent

Was gaged by our king-"

But to state this in legal form there is appended, when "Hamlet" comes to be printed in the folio:

"-which had returned

To the inheritance of Fortinbras

Had he been vanquisher: as by the same covenant
The carriage of his article designed

His fell to Hamlet."

Would any playwright or poet have thought necessary, in revising his copy for a second edition, to have added that legal explanation for the benefit of a promiscuous audience at a theater? If this does not show that the writer was a lawyer born and bred, it is hard to believe that such things as lawyers and Shakespearean plays exist. Again, the quarto reads:

"I did repel his letters, deny his gifts,
As you did charge me,-"

Which is changed in the folio to

"I did repel his letters, and denied
His access to me."

The lines

"For in that dreame of death, when we awake,

And, borne before our everlasting judge,
From whence no passenger euer returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile and the accursed damn'd"

Are remodeled by a lawyer into

"The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns-"

"bourne" being a law term.

The lines

"Yet you cannot

Play upon me, besides to be demanded by a spunge

Are made to read

'Besides, to be demanded of a spunge: what replication Should be made by the son of a king?"

Besides, in the folio appear the legal propositions:

"Now must your conscience my acquittance seal.

It will appear: but tell me

Why you proceeded not against these feats
So crimeful and so capital in nature -"

which in the quarto were not deemed, it seems, necessary to the dialogue, as indeed, from anything but a lawyer's point of view, they are not.

But most wonderful of all is the dialogue in the grave-yard scene. In the quarto, the two gravediggers are wondering whether Ophelia, having committed suicide, is to be buried in consecrated ground, instead of at a cross-road with a stake