between a classic phrase and one in a Shakespearean play, disputed or undisputed. And the application of such texts as have been indicated, it will be found, serves to break down the majority of Mr. Collins's classic parallels. Many are non-significant; many are phrases current in Elizabethan literature; many more bear upon plays which a multitude of critics recognise to contain more or less of non-Shakespearean matter.

And as regards one of the parallels on which Mr. Collins laid most stress, that between a passage in TROILUS and one in Plato's FIRST ALCIBIADES-a parallel which is the more likely to impress the ordinary reader because it had been already drawn by the late Richard Grant White-it will be shown in the following treatise, where the TROILUS passage is dealt with, that the resort to Plato for its source is an error, there being others, lying to Shakespeare's hand in English, which more exactly meet the case. Yet other plausible and interesting parallels similarly dissolve under analysis. The referring of three lines in HENRY V (1, ii, 180–83), for instance, to a passage from Cicero's DE REPUBLICA, quoted by Augustine,' proceeds on the assumption that since there was no current translation of Augustine's

1 De Civitate Dei, ii, 21.

book or of the fragments of the REPUBLIC, Shakespeare cannot reasonably be supposed to have met with the passage save in the Latin. Now, supposing the passage had reached him as a Latin quotation, the power to give power to give a free rendering of it would be very far from justifying the inference that he read much in the Latin classics; and Mr. Collins, as it happens, offers no further reason for supposing that he had read the DE CIVITATE DEI. To what then are we led? What can be more unlikely than that such a passage should in Elizabethan England have been left for a dramatist to put in currency? In so common a book as Sir Thomas Elyot's GOVERNOUR (1531) the central idea is expounded in the opening chapter; in De Mornay's treatise on the Christian religion (translated in 1589) the thesis of the general harmony of nature is reiterated in several chapters; and it lay open to every divine to comment it with the sentence of Cicero out of Augustine.

Turning from such eminently unconvincing instances of Shakespeare's study of Latin literature, we find ourselves challenged by a series of parallels of phrase such as those between "the lazy foot of time" and Euripides' Sapòv xpóvov móda (BACCH. 889); "the belly-pinched wolf" (LEAR, iii, 1) and the KoiλoyáσTopes λúño of Aeschylus (SEPTEM C.

THEB. 1037-8); "blossoms of your love" and ěρwтos ǎvoos; and so forth. "Such similarities of expression are cumulatively very remarkable," says Mr. Collins.1 Interesting they certainly are, but surely not significant of anything save the quite spontaneous duplication of many forms of phrase in different lands and times, and the passage of others from age to age in the common stream of literature. The lean-waisted form of the wolf, surely, is equally notable to all who know him; and "blossoms of love" is a natural trope wherever tropes are turned. After pronouncing such things cumulatively remarkable, Mr. Collins admits: "All these may be of course, and most of them almost certainly are, mere coincidences."

2

When, again, we are led for firmer footing to instances of positive "Greekisms" in the plays, that is, actual impositions of Greek idiom upon English speech, we are left asking whether the classical thesis has not by this time destroyed itself. Mr. Collins's main contention, as we saw, is that Shakespeare read Latin fluently, but resorted to Latin translations for his knowledge of the Greek classics. Now he has insensibly reached the position that Shakespeare was so steeped in Greek as to think in Greek idiom when 2 Id. p. 52.

1 Studies, p. 51.

writing dramatic English. The argument is in the air.

Leaving the special question of Shakespeare's learning for further separate discussion, let us now ask, How shall we ascertain or prove an influence upon Shakespeare's thinking from what he read? That he had read this book or that is a matter of interest for all his students; but the weighty question is, What part did any book or books play in developing his mind? On this problem Mr. Collins had little to say. In concluding his examination of my own essay, he admitted that Montaigne's Essays, which were certainly known. to Shakespeare, "could hardly have failed to attract and interest him greatly";' and again: "It may have been that, with a genius stimulated, and even enriched, by the author of the APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE, he went on with the creation of Hamlet, and of Vincentio, or at all events made them the mouthpieces of his own meditative fancies. But we must guard against the old fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc." And he concludes thus: "The true nature of Shakespeare's indebtedness to Montaigne may be fairly estimated if we say what, we believe, may be said with truth, that had the Essays never appeared (2) Id. p. 295.

1 Studies, p. 294.

there is nothing to warrant the assumption that what he has in common with Montaigne would not have been equally conspicuous."

Does the same formula hold, then, for the alleged saturation of Shakespeare with the classics? How, to come to the point, is a literary influence to be proved or disproved? Mr. Collins, after proffering his classical parallels, candidly indicates a consciousness that he has raised more problems than he claims to have solved:

"But, it may be urged, if Shakespeare was acquainted with the Greek dramas he would have left unequivocal indications of that acquaintance with them by reproducing their form, by drawing with unmistakable directness on their dramatis personae for archetypes, by borrowing incidents, situations and scenes from them, or at least by directly and habitually referring to them. The answer to this is obvious. Of all playwrights that have ever lived Shakespeare appears to have been the most practical and the most conventional. The poet of all ages was pre-eminently the child of his own age. He belonged to a guild who spoke a common language, who derived their material from common sources, who cast that material in common moulds, and who appealed to a common audience. The Elizabethan drama was no exotic, but drew its vitality and nutriment from its native soil. The differences which separate Attic tragedy from Elizabethan are radical and essential. Had Shakespeare known the Greek plays by heart he could not have taken them for his models, or transferred, without recasting and reconstructing, a single scene from them. He had also to consider what appealed to his audience. The works of the Attic masters were as yet familiar only to scholars. Allusions to the legends of the houses of Atreus