and these from "Venus and Adonis,"—
"Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted,
What bargains may I make, still to be sealing!"—
to which Mr. Rushton adds from "Hamlet,"—
"A combination and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal."
Act iii. Sc. 4.
"Now must your conscience my acquittance seal."—Act iv. Sc. 7.
And because indentures and deeds and covenants are sealed, these passages must be accepted as part of the evidence that Shakespeare narrowly escaped being made Lord High Chancellor of England! It requires all the learning and the logic of a Lord Chief Justice and a London barrister to establish a connection between such premises and such a conclusion. And if Shakespeare's lines smell of law, how strong is the odor of parchment and red tape in these, from Drayton's Fourth Eclogue (1605):
"Kindnesse againe with kindnesse was repay'd, And with sweet kisses covenants were sealed."
We ask pardon of the reader for the production of contemporary evidence, that, in Shakespeare's day, a knowledge of the significance and binding nature of a seal was not confined to him among poets; for surely a man must be both a lawyer and a Shakespearean commentator to forget that the use of seals is as old as the art of writing, and, perhaps, older, and that the practice has furnished a figure of speech to poets from the time when it was written, that out of the whirlwind Job heard, "It is turned as clay to the seal," and probably from a period yet more remote.
And is Lord Campbell really in earnest in the following grave and precisely expressed opinion?