interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of
practising lawyers?"

Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible
explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have
made the suggestion that Shakespeare might, conceivably, have been
a clerk in an attorney's office before he came to London. Mr.
Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his opinion as to the
probability of this being true. His answer was as follows: "You
require us to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if true,
positive and irrefragable evidence in his own handwriting might
have been forthcoming to establish it. Not having been actually
enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at
Stratford nor of the superior Courts at Westminster would present
his name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it
might reasonably have been expected that there would be deeds or
wills witnessed by him still extant, and after a very diligent
search none such can be discovered."

Upon this Lord Penzance comments: "It cannot be doubted that Lord
Campbell was right in this. No young man could have been at work
in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to
act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work
and name." There is not a single fact or incident in all that is
known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports
this notion of a clerkship. And after much argument and surmise
which has been indulged in on this subject, we may, I think, safely
put the notion on one side, for no less an authority than Mr. Grant
White says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an
attorney has been "blown to pieces."