the author of the _Plays_ and _Poems_ could not
have been a butcher's apprentice. Away, therefore, with tradition. But
the author of the _Plays_ and _Poems must_ have had a very large and a
very accurate knowledge of the law. Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford
must have been an attorney's clerk! The method is simplicity itself. By
similar reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a
soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things beside,
according to the inclination and the exigencies of the commentator. It
would not be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin
as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time.

However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has fully
recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that Shakespeare must have
had a sound legal training. "It may, of course, be urged," he writes,
"that Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, and particularly that branch
of it which related to morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that
no one has ever contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is
wrong; that contention also has been put forward.) It may be urged that
his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and callings,
notably of marine and military affairs, was also extraordinary, and yet
no one has suspected him of being a sailor or a soldier. (Wrong again.
Why even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse 'suspect' that he was a soldier!)
This may be conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To
these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but
with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was
simply saturated. In season and out of season now in manifest, now in
recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and
illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from
it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his
dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of
which is not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from
three books easily accessible to him, namely Tottell's _Precedents_
(1572), Pulton's _Statutes_ (1578), and Fraunce's _Lawier's Logike_
(1588), works with which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but
much of it could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance
with legal proceedings. We quite agree with Mr. Cast