proposition which ordinarily rests on the indiscriminate acceptance of all the plays as authentic, he set up a seriously imperfect case.

The proposition in question is that Shakespeare was a good classical scholar. Lowell, a generation ago, had ventured the much more moderate thesis : that Shakespeare " may have laid hold of an edition of the Greek tragedians, Graece et Latine, and then . . contrived to worry some considerable meaning out of them.' This suggestion, modest in comparison with the speculation which went on before Farmer, the critic sought to substantiate with a series of phraseological parallels which, like those since collected by Professor Churton Collins, make Shakespeare's mind retain unimportant verbal tricks, tags, and saws from the Greek drama without assimilating anything else.2

1 Essay on "Shakespeare Once More" in Among my Books, rep. in The English Poets, etc. (Camelot Series), 1888, p. 115 sq.

2 Thus Lowell, while "laying no stress upon such "trifles," suggests that such a Shakespearean line as

"Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled

may be an imitation of such a line as

ἄπειρος, ἀθαλάττωτος, ἀσαλαμίνιος

"

in the Frogs of Aristophanes, and that Milton followed either Shakespeare or the Greek in the line

"Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved."

Professor Churton Collins (Studies in Shakespeare, p. 61) finds a similar parallel in the line

ἄμοιρον, ἀκτέριστον, ἀνόσιον νέκυν

in the Antigone (1071). Both Professors had forgotten that Spenser has such lines as

Lowell's parallels have never set up any conviction, being one and all explicable in terms of the general literary and theatrical tradition through Seneca. But Lowell's critical miscarriage did not deter Professor Fiske from advancing a far more extravagant proposition, backed by far less semblance of proof. Here are the Professor's words :

"There was in the town [Stratford-on-Avon] a remarkably good free grammar school, where he [Shakespeare] might have learned the small Latin and less Greek' which his friend Ben Jonson assures us he possessed. This expression, by the way, is usually misunderstood, because people do not pause to consider it. Coming from Ben Jonson, I should say that 'small Latin and less Greek' might fairly describe the amount of those languages ordinarily possessed by a member of the graduating class at Harvard in good standing. It can hardly imply less than the ability to read Terence at sight, and perhaps Euripides less fluently. The author of the plays, with his unerring accuracy of observation, knows Latin enough at least to use the Latin part of English most skilfully; at the same time, when he has occasion to use Greek authors, such as Homer or Plutarch, he usually prefers an English translation.” . . . "It seems clear that he had a good reading acquaintance with French and Italian, though he often uses translations, as, for instance, Florio's version of Montaigne." 1

"Unpeopled, unmanured, unproved, unpraysed

(Faerie Queene, B. IV, c. x, st. 5) ;

(Id. IV, vii, 40);

"Uncombed, uncurled, and carelessly unshed "

"Unbodied, unsouled, unheard, unseen "

(Id. VII, vii, 46).

1 Atlantic Monthly, November 1897, pp. 640, 642.

One rejoices to learn that an ordinary graduate of Harvard in good standing can read Terence at sight, and "perhaps Euripides less fluently." The ordinary graduate of good standing in the Old World is believed to fall short of that measure of facility. But however that may be, the assumption that Shakespeare could do these things is so fantastic as to entitle us to retort on Professor Fiske the charge of not having paused to consider the meaning of Jonson's phrase. Such mastery of Latin and Greek as he defines was really not so common in Elizabethan England that it could seem a small thing even in the eyes of Ben Jonson, who in all likelihood read Euripides, not to speak of Aeschylus, much less fluently than he did Terence; and who can hardly have been so consummately at home in Persius or Plautus as to think little of the power to read Terence at sight. Professor Fiske's judgment is an echo of that of Maginn, who decided that Jonson "only meant to say that Shakespeare's acquirements in the learned languages were small in comparison with those of professed scholars of scholastic fame." Such affirmations are really on a level with the most gratuitous assumptions of the Baconians. Jonson cannot rationally be supposed to

1 Maginn's Shakespeare Papers, ed. New York, 1856, p. 241.

have put such a meaning in such words. He himself, though a widely-read scholar, had no "scholastic fame"; and to suppose that he would think it worth while, in a commendatory poem, to make light of Shakespeare's Greek and Latin because it was not far above the level of acquirement of most well-educated Englishmen of his day, is nothing short of fantastic.

Yet this extravagant doctrine was not only heightened by Professor Fiske, but further extended by Professor Churton Collins, who, without citing Maginn or Fiske, undertakes "to prove that, so far from Shakespeare having no pretension to classical scholarship, he could almost certainly read Latin with as much facility as a cultivated Englishman of our own time reads French; that with some at least of the principal Latin classics he was intimately acquainted; that through the Latin language he had access to the Greek classics; and that of the Greek classics in the Latin versions he had in all probability a remarkably extensive knowledge."

As Professor Fiske outgoes Maginn, Professor Collins outgoes Fiske. He ascribes to Shakespeare, in effect, a greater facility in Latin than is possessed by many professional scholars, because much of

1 Studies in Shakespeare, 1904, PP. 3-4.

Latin is for any man far harder, more elliptic, more obscure than is any modern French for a cultivated modern Englishman. For the rest, Professor Collins echoes his predecessors :

be

"Jonson, we must remember, was a scholar, and posed ostentatiously as a scholar in the technical sense of the term. . . . To him 'small Latin' and 'less Greek' would connote what it would to Scaliger or to Casaubon. . . . We may quite sure that Jonson would have spoken of the classical attainments of Shelley, of Tennyson, and of Browning in the same way. And yet it is notorious that these three poets, though they had no pretension to 'scholarship,' were as familiar with the Greek and Roman classics in the original as they were with the classics of their own language."

Thus can the most explicit testimony be reduced to nullity by an advocate with a pet thesis to maintain. If a Baconian had asked Professor Collins those four questions

1. At what age, and under what conditions, did Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning acquire their familiarity with the classics?

2. What was Shakespeare doing at the age at which those poets were doing their leisured reading?

3. If Ben Jonson would have credited Tennyson with "small Latin and less Greek," what could he have said of Sidney, or Spenser, or Bacon?

4. Did Jonson ever say anything of the sort concerning university men with no more pro