and hereditaments whatsoever, situate, lying, and being in the towns, hamlets, villages, fields and grounds of Stratfordupon-Avon, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe, or any of them, in the said county of Warwick, which heretofore were the INHERITANCE of William Shakspere, gent., deceased." The word inheritance could only be used in one legal sense; they came to him by descent, as heir-at-law of his father. It would be difficult to find a more distinct confirmation of the memorandum upon the grant of arms in the Herald's. College to John Shakspere, "he hath lands and tenements, of good wealth and substance, 5007." The lands of Bishopton and Welcombe are in the parish of Stratford, but not in the borough. Bishopton was a hamlet, having an ancient chapel of ease. We hold, then, that in the year 1578 John Shakspere, having become more completely an agriculturist-a yeoman, as he is described in a deed of 1579-ceased, for the purposes of business, to be an occupier within the borough of Stratford. Other aldermen are rated to pay towards the furniture of pikemen, billmen, and archers, six shillings and eightpence; whilst John Shakspere is to pay three shillings and fourpence. Why less than other aldermen? The next entry but one, which relates to a brother alderman, suggests an answer to the question :-"Robert Bratt, nothing IN THIS PLACE." Again, ten months after,-"It is ordained that every alderman shall pay weekly, towards the relief of the poor, four-pence, save John Shakspere and Robert Bratt, who shall not be taxed to pay any thing." Here John Shakspere is associated with Robert Bratt, who, according to the previous entry, was to pay nothing in this place; that is, in the borough of Stratford, to which the orders of the council alone apply. The return in 1579 of Mr. Shakspere as leaving unpaid the sum of three shillings and three-pence, was the return upon a levy for the borough, in which, although the possessor of property, he might have ceased to reside, or have only partially resided, paying his assessments in the parish. The Borough of Stratford and the Parish of Stratford are essentially different things, as regards entries of the Corporation and of the Court of Record. The Report from Commissioners of the Municipal Corporations says, "The limits of the borough extend over a space of about half a mile in breadth, and rather more in length * * *. The mayor, recorder, and senior aldermen of the borough have also jurisdiction, as justices of the peace, over a small town or suburb adjoining the Church of Stratford-uponAvon, called Old Stratford, and over the precincts of the church itself." We shall have occasion to revert to this distinction between the borough and the parish at a more advanced period in the life of Shakspere's father, when his utter ruin has been somewhat rashly inferred from certain obscure registers. Seeing, then, that at any rate, in the year 1574, when John Shakspere purchased two freehold houses in Stratford, it was scarcely necessary for him to withdraw his son William from school, as Rowe has it, on account of the narrowness of his circumstances (the education of that school costing the father nothing), it is not difficult to believe that the son remained there till the period when boys were usually withdrawn from grammar-schools. In those days the education of the university commenced much earlier than at present. Boys intended for the learned professions, and more especially for the church, commonly went to Oxford and Cambridge at eleven or twelve years of age. If they were not intended for those professions, they probably remained at the grammar-school till they were thirteen or fourteen; and then they were fitted for being apprenticed to tradesmen, or articled to attorneys, a numerous and thriving body in those days of cheap litigation. Many also went early to the Inns of Court, which were the universities of the law, and where there was real study and discipline in direct connection with the several Societies. To assume that William Shakspere did not stay long enough at the grammarschool of Stratford to obtain a very fair "proficiency in Latin," with some knowledge of Greek, is to assume an absurdity upon the face of the circumstances; and it could never have been assumed at all, had not Rowe, setting out upon a false theory, that, because in the works of Shakspere, “we scarce find any traces of anything that looks like an imitation of the ancients," held that therefore “his not copying at least something from them may be an argument of his never having read them." Opposed to this is the statement of Aubrey, much nearer to the times of Shakspere: "he understood Latin pretty well." Rowe had been led into his illogical inference by the "small Latin and less Greek" of Jonson; the "old mother-wit" of Denham; the "his learning was very little " of Fuller; the "native wood-notes wild" of Milton,—phrases, every one of which is to be taken with considerable qualification, whether we regard the peculiar characters of the utterers, or the circumstances connected with the words themselves. The question rests not upon the interpretation of the dictum of this authority or that; but upon the indisputable fact that the very earliest writings of Shakspere are imbued with a spirit of classical antiquity; and that the allusive nature of the learning that manifests itself in them, whilst it offers the best proof of his familiarity with the ancient writers, is a circumstance which has misled those who never attempted to dispute the existence of the learning which was displayed in the direct pedantry of his contemporaries. "If," said Hales of Eton, "he had not read the classics, he had likewise not stolen from them." Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and all the early dramatists, overload their plays with quotation and mythological allusion. According to Hales, they steal, and therefore they have read. He who uses his knowledge skilfully is assumed not to have read. It is scarcely necessary to entertain any strong opinions as to the worldly calling of William Shakspere, between the period of his leaving the grammar-school and his occupation as a dramatic poet and actor. The internal evidence of his writings would appear to show the most intimate acquaintance with the ordinary life of a cultivator; and his own pursuits, in his occasional or complete retirement at Stratford, exhibit the same tastes. But Malone has a confident belief that upon Shakspere leaving school he was placed for two or three years in the office of one of the seven attorneys who practised in the Court of Record in Stratford. Mr. Wheler, of Stratford, having taken up the opinion many years ago, upon the suggestion of Malone, that Shakspere might have been in an attorney's office, availed himself of his opportunities as a solicitor to examine hundreds of documents of Shakspere's time, in the hope of discovering his signature. No such signature was found. Malone adds, "The comprehensive mind of our poet, it must be owned, embraced almost every object of nature, every trade and every art, the manners of every description of men, and the general language of almost every profession: but his knowledge and application of legal terms seem to me not merely such as might have been acquired by the casual observation of his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill; and he is so fond of displaying it on all occasions, that there is, I think, some ground for supposing that he was early initiated in at least the forms of the law.” a Malone then cites a number of passages exemplifying Shakspere's knowledge and application of legal terms. The theory was originally propounded by Malone, in his edition of 1790; and it gave rise to many subsequent notes of the commentators, pointing out these technical allusions. The frequency of their occurrence, and the accuracy of their use, are, however, no proof to us that Shakspere was professionally a lawyer. There is every reason to believe that the principles of law, especially of the law of real property, were much more generally understood in those days than in our own. Educated men, chiefly those who possessed property, looked upon law as a science instead of a mystery; and its terms were used in familiar speech instead of being regarded as a technical jargon. When Hamlet says, "This fellow might be in his time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries," he employs terms with which every gentleman was familiar, because the owner of property was often engaged in a practical acquaintance with them. This is one of the examples given by Malone. "No writer," again says Malone, “but one who had been conversant with the technical language of leases and other conveyances, would have used determination as synonymous to end." He refers to a passage in the 13th Sonnet, "So should that beauty which you hold in lease We may add that Coriolanus uses the verb in the same way : "Shall I be charg'd no further than this present? Must all determine here ?" a Posthumous 'Life.' The word is used as a term of law, with a full knowledge of its primary meaning; and so Shakspere uses it. The Chroniclers use it in the same way. Upon the passage in the Sonnets to which we have just referred, Malone has a note, with a parallel passage from Daniel :— "In beauty's lease expir'd, appears The date of age, the calends of our death." Daniel was not a lawyer, but a scholar and a courtier. Upon the passage in Richard III.,— "Tell me, what state, what dignity, what honour, Malone asks what poet but Shakspere has used the word demise in this sense; observing that "hath demised, granted, and to farm let" is the constant language of leases. Being the constant language, a man of the world would be familiar with it. A quotation from a theologian may show this familiarity as well as one from a poet :-"I conceive it ridiculous to make the condition of an indenture something that is necessarily annexed to the possession of the demise." If Warburton had used law-terms in this logical manner, we might have recollected his early career; but we do not learn that Hammond, the great divine from whom we quote, had any other than a theological education. We are further told, when Davy says to Shallow, in 'Henry IV.,' "Those precepts cannot be served,” that precepts, in this sense, is a word only known in the office of a justice of peace. Very different would it have been indeed from Shakspere's usual precision, had he put any word in the mouth of the justice's Iclerk that was not known in his office. When the Boatswain, in ‘The Tempest,' roars out "Take in the topsail,” he uses a phrase that is known only on shipboard. In the passage of 'Henry IV.,' Part II.,— "For what in me was purchas'd, Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort," it is held that purchase, being used in its strict legal sense, could be known only to a lawyer. An educated man could scarcely avoid knowing the great distinction of purchase as opposed to descent, the only two modes of acquiring real estate. This general knowledge, which it would be very re |