founded upon ignorance; for while the latter sets up the manners and pretensions of the medical pedant as the butt of his ridicule, there is not a passage in his writings which indicates the slightest knowledge of the art or science of the profession which he so assiduously covers with contempt. The gibberish of dog-latin pretended prescriptions is his
nearest approach to it. Shakespeare, on the other hand, evinces so surprising and minute a knowledge of both, that it would
be no difficult task to prove from his writings that he had been a diligent student of the healing art, and thence it might be inferred that he had been a doctor's apprentice, with a pro bability not much below that which has been so ingeniously developed by the Lord Chief Justice, to prove that he was an attorney's clerk. I yield, indeed, to Mr. Payne Collier's theory as argued by Lord Campbell, the precedence of pro bability, inasmuch as Shakespeare's knowledge of law is technical, while his knowledge of medicine is general, and such as he might have more readily acquired outside the professional limits. His knowledge of law is that which a clerk might possess; his knowledge of medicine is evidently the acquirement of a riper age, capable of resolving obser vation into principle ; a very different thing to the inventory of an apothecary's shop, which Lord Campbell justly scouts as evidence of more than casual remark and faithful memory. The more modest and probable conclusion, however, would seem to be, not that which the lawyer may compliment him self with, nor that which the doctor or the sailor might respec tively arrive at, in consequence of the poet's knowledge of medical and nautical affairs; but simply, that in Shakespeare the world possessed a man, who, like Aristotle, was endowed with all the knowledge of his time, combined with the divine
gift which the Greek did not possess, of making it available in the most gorgeous employment of fancy and language. He was a naturalist in the widest sense, and a poet in the
