employment." John Shakespeare, as we have seen, was so far occupied
with agriculture as to be legally styled a "yeoman." Nor am I sure but
the ancient functions of an English yeoman's oldest son might be a
better education for what the Poet afterwards accomplished than was to
be had at any free-school or university in England. His large and apt
use of legal terms and phrases has induced many good Shakespearians
learned in the law to believe that he must have been for some time a
student of that noble science. It is indeed difficult to understand
how he could have spoken as he often does, without some study in the
law; but, as he seems thoroughly at home in the specialties of many
callings, it is possible his knowledge in the law may have grown from
the large part his father had, either as magistrate or as litigant, in
legal transactions. I am sure he either studied divinity or else had a
strange gift of knowing it without studying it; and his ripeness in
the knowledge of disease and of the healing art is a standing marvel
to the medical faculty.

Knight has speculated rather copiously and romantically upon the idea
of Shakespeare's having been a spectator of the more-than-royal pomp
and pageantry with which the Queen was entertained by Leicester at
Kenilworth in 1575. Stratford was fourteen miles from Kenilworth, and
the Poet was then eleven years old. That his ears were assailed and
his imagination excited by the fame of that magnificent display cannot
be doubted, for all that part of the kingdom was laid under
contribution to supply it, and was resounding with the noise of it;
but his father was not of a rank to be summoned or invited thither,
nor was he of an age to go thither without his father. Positive
evidence either way on the point there is none; nor can I discover any
thing in his plays that would fairly infer him to have drunk in the
splendour of that occasion, however the fierce attractions thereof may