The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859

Shakespeare a Lawyer. By William L. Rushton. 16mo. pp. 50. London: 1858. Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered. By John Lord Campbell, LL.D., F.R.S.E. 12mo. pp. 117. London: 1859.

4

Into the trap so innocently set the London Athenaeum thus plunges headlong:—"Chalmers, we believe, first put Shakespeare in an attorney's office. Malone accepted the hint."

5

Lord Campbell gives the date 1589; but see Mr. Dyce's indisputable authority. Greene's Works. Vol. I., pp. xxxvii. and ciii.

6

It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,—one or more of them,—whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was published in 1581. It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

7

Falstaff, for instance, speaks of "the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms or two actions."

8

Mr. Elliott, in his New England History, has wisely gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in forming a just notion of the character of a population. We cannot but wish that our town-historians, instead of giving so much space to idle and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the "elegant mansions" of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more interesting than their annals. We would much rather know whether a man wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than whether he was a descendant of Rameses I.