13th April. twerz is no scene of a play in the English language more familiar to us all, whether students of Shakespeare or mere outsiders, than the trial scene in the Merchant of Venice. When we are young we begin to read it with fear and trembling for the life of Antonio, and as we read on our fears are changed to admiration for Portia's cleverness, and we chuckle over the skill with which Shylock's apparently excellent case is controverted, and he is himself made the defendant instead of the plaintiff, and finally shown to have deserved the penalty of death. As we get older we begin to have some sympathy for Shylock, and to feel that he was upset by a very palpable trick, and that however pleasant to our prepossessions the turning of the tables may be, Shylock was the victim of a gross injustice, By and by we begin to marvel at the procedure in' this remarkable Court.
rametists as a rule lose their bearings altogether when they attempt to depict the procedure in a Court of Law; but Shakespeare shows in many of his plays such an intimate acquaintance with legal technicalities, that it has been confidently asserted that he must have been at one time a clerk in a lawyer's office. However this may be, his picture of the procedure in the case of Shylock v. Antonio is utterly unlike anything ever seen in an English Court of Law, and Lord Campbell, the Lord High Chancellor, who was such a lover of Shakespeare that, even when a old man, he used to walk from his home at Kenington to Sadler's Wells Iheatre, Islington, whenever Mr. Phelps produced another of Shakespeare's plays, and was even known to walk a visitor to the" theatre and, on finding it closed for the night, walk him cheerfully home again, exerted himself to explain it away. Mr. John 'I. Doyle contributed to the Ocerland Monthly in 1886, after a conversation with the late Lawrence Barrett, the actor, a memorandum on this memorable trial, which has just been republished in that interesting Tiehed under the auspices of the Shake-repertory of Shakespearean lore pub-
speare Society of New York, and now its tenth year, Shakespeariana. As to the anomalous procedure in the Court he says: "Save in the fact a defendant, ud a judge—charac-that the scene presents a plaintiff,
ters essential to litigation under any system of procedure—there is no resemblance in the proceedings on the stage to anything that could possibly occur in an English court, or an court administering English law. No jury is impanelled to determine the facts, no witnesses called by either side; on the contrary, when the court opens, the Duke who presides is already fully informed of the facts, and has communicated them, in writing, to Bellario, a learned doctor of Padua, and invited him to come and render judgment in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.