lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft."

But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he
is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence. "Let a
non-professional man, however acute," writes Lord Campbell again,
"presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science
in discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into
laughable absurdity."

And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He
had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy
familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in English
jurisprudence." And again: "Whenever he indulges this propensity
he uniformly lays down good law." Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says:
"If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not
see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law
while writing it." Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke speak of "the
marvelous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent
adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical
knowledge of their form and force." Malone, himself a lawyer,
wrote: "His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might
be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending
mind; it has the appearance of technical skill." Another lawyer
and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says: "No
dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son
of a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns
of Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with
Shakespeare's readiness and exactness. And the significance of
this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the language
of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The phrases peculiar