488 
his time and thoughts with questions ’not immediately connected 
with his professional occupation, that he should have sustained so 
long and so important a literary effort, as writing the lives of the 
Lord Chancellors and Lord Chief- Justices of the Queen’s Bench. 
There is no question of its being a work of great research, great 
impartiality, and full of acute and able remarks ; the stores of infor- 
mation are at once various and minute ; the style is far from being 
polished, but he is always clear and intelligible to his reader ; he 
has done his work thoroughly and well. He happily unites the office 
of the lawyer and the historian ; for the careful law-student of the 
work will find in the personal history of our Chancellors and Chief- 
Justices that there is also pervading it a history of our jurisprudence. 
He will trace the gradual establishment of its sounder principles, he 
will mark the correction of what had been vague or erroneous. 
But there is another and a more striking indication of the activity 
of his mind, and the versatility of his talent, as regards questions which 
did not come before him as a judge, which is contained in his letter 
to Mr Payne Collier, on the Legal Acquirements of Shakspeare. He 
had glanced at this subject in his “ Lives of the Chancellors and Chief- 
Justices.” But in this letter, he brings forward the arguments in 
favour of an opinion, which had for sometime been gaining ground 
amongst the admirers of Shakspeare — viz., that before he went to 
London for his theatrical life, he had been clerk in an attorney’s 
office at Stratford. There are some cotemporary circumstances 
which seem to lead to this opinion, and these Lord Campbell states 
in the opening of the letter ; but his chief argument is derived from 
the corroborative evidence supplied by passages selected from his 
plays. He quotes from twenty-three plays, and he conceives that 
the passages he quotes give a 'probable evidence that they must 
have been written by one who had once been a professional lawyer, 
and familiar with its technical language. I have heard persons 
speak rather in a depreciating manner of this little production, and 
who seemed to consider it as unworthy of Lord Campbell, and in 
fact as in itself of little interest. I am much surprised at this opi- 
nion. I think the case is made out in a very ingenious manner; 
and surely it cannot be a matter devoid of interest to trace back any 
of the sentiments and expressions of Shakspeare to their original 
sources, and to analyse the materials of a mind like his. That 
Shakspeare who drew his imagery and his topics from all sources 
