racies; I don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or Grecian
or Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a past-master in
those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't remember that there
is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing testimony--unanswerable and
unattackable testimony as to any of Shakespeare's hundred specialties,
except one--the law.

Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back
with certainty the changes that various trades and their processes and
technicalities have undergone in the long stretch of a century or two
and find out what their processes and technicalities were in those early
days, but with the law it is different: it is mile-stoned and documented
all the way back, and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex
and intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of
knowing whether Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether his
law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal shop-talk
is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a machine-made
counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional loiterings in
Westminster.

Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every
experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of our
day. His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the sure touch and the ease
and confidence of a person who has LIVED what he is talking about, not
gathered it from books and random listenings. Hear him:

Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each
sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole
canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible
everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and
cat-headed, and the ship under headway.

Again:

The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and sky-sails
set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all were
aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards and booms, reeving the
studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain piled upon her,
until she was covered with canvas, her sails looking like a great white
cloud resting upon a black speck.

Once more. A race in the Pacific:

Our antagonist was in her best trim. Being clear of the point, the
breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under our sails, but we
would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the rigging
of the CALIFO