Diogenes are put together as in a mosaic, but with a perfectly modern ease, lightness, and perspicuity of language.

" 1

In the ephemeral "potboilers" of the Elizabethan actors we moderns inherit the literary cream of insolent Greece and haughty Rome; a knowledge which has now become so incorporate with our thoughts and language that the question is arising whether the study at any rate of Greek, is still essential to the equipment of a modern scholar.

I have before me the prospectus of a projected work by W. Theobald entitled The Classical Element in the Shakespeare Plays. Therein the author claims the acquaintance of the provincial and self-educated Shakespeare with the following sources :

Abstemius. Ælian. Eschylus. Æsop. Agard. Alanus. Anacreon. Anaxandrides. Anthologia Græca. Apollonius Rhodius. Appianus. Apuleius. Aristophanes. Aristotle. Artemidorus. Athenaeus. Augustine. Aurelius. Ausonius. Avianus. Avienus. Bacon. Bede. Beza. Bion. Boethius. Buchanan. Cæsar. Caius. Callimachus. Callistratus. Calpurnius. Camararius. Carcinus. Catullus. Cebes. Cicero. Claudian. Copus. Curtus. Dares. Democrates. Democritus. Dictys. Dionysius. Empedocles. Ennius. Erasmus. Euclid. Euripides. V. Flaccus. Florus. Fracastorius. Galileo. Gellius. Gesner. Giovanni da Genova, Gregorius. Gualtier. Heraclitus. Hermes. Herodotus. Hesiod. Hippocrates. Homer. Horace. Horus Apollo.

I Commentaries, p. 62.

Isidorus. Juvenal. Lilly. Livy. Lucan. Lucian. Lucretius. Mandeville. Mantuanus. Martial. Menander. Moschus. Muretus. Musæus. Orpheus. Ovid. Palingenius. Paracelsus. Parmenides. Persius. Petronius. Phædrus. Philemon. Philonides. Philostratus. Pindar. Plato. Plautus. Pliny. Plutarch. Pomponius. Posidippus. Priscianus. Propertius. Ptolomæus. Sallust. Saxo. Scaliger. Seneca. Silius Italicus. Sophocles. Statius. Strada. Stradanus. Suetonius. Syrus. Tacitus. Terence. Theocritus. Theognis. Tibullus. Tyrtæus. Valerius. Vanini. Varro. Vasari. Velleius. Virgil. Walsingham. Zeno. Bandello. Berni. Caxton. Caxton. "Hitopadesa." Holinshed. R. Johnson. Josephus. J. Lilly. "Mahabharata. Montaigne. Enguerrande de Monstrelet. Benoit de Sainte More. Hurtado de Mendoza. Pigafetta. Rabelais. Saadi. Ramus. Sidney. Topsell.

Even The Epistle Dedicatorie of the First Folio purporting to have been written by Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell now proves to be to a large extent a mere transcript of Pliny's dedication of his Natural History.

I conclude the present chapter by some groups of passages which will serve still further to display the intellectual kinship between dramatists and philosophers, and their common acquaintance with classical literature.

LAWS A COBWEB.

Great men like great flies through Laws cobwebs break.

WEBSTER (Sir T. Wyatt) 1607. You must hang up the laws like cobwebs in

old rooms through which great flies break through, the less being caught by the wing.

DEKKER (If this be not a good play the devil is in it)

[1612.

One of the Seven was wont to say that laws were like cobwebs where the small flies were caught and the great break through. BACON (Apophthegms.)

THE BODY A PRISON.

Some say that the body is the grave of the Soul which may be thought to be buried in our present life.... the body is an enclosure, or prison, in which the soul is incarcerated. PLATO (Cratylus) translated by Professor

The body is the prison of the soul.

Did'st thou ever

[Jowett, 1892.

LYLY (Endymion 1. 2.) 1591.

see a lark in a cage?

Such is the soul in the body.

WEBSTER (Malfi 1v. 2.) 1616-1623.

He the flitted life does win unto her native prison to return.

SPENSER (Fairy Queen 1. 7. 70.) 1590-1609. Fearing lest from her cage the weary soul would flit.

IBID (Ibid III. II.)

Life being weary of these worldly bars.

SHAKESPEARE (Julius Cæsar 1. 3.) 1623.

(Enter Constance.)

Look who comes here! A grave unto a soul
Holding the eternal spirit against her will
In the vile prison of afflicted breath.

SHAKESPEARE (King John 111. 4.) 1623.

The spiraculum, or inspired essence..., the

substance of the soul.

BACON (Advancement of Learning Iv. 3.) 1605. When this eternal substance of my soul Did live imprisoned in my wanton flesh.

KYD (Spanish Tragedy) 1594-1602. That immortal spirit and incorruptible substance of my soul may be obscure and sleep awhile within this house of flesh.

SIR T. BROWNE (Religio Medici) 1635-1643. This hollow prison of my flesh.

SHAKESPEARE (Titus Andronicus III. 2.) 1594.
Let him come thrill his partisan

Against this breast that thro a large wide wound
My mighty soul might rush out of this prison
To fly more freely to yon crystal palace
Where honour sits enthroned.

WEBSTER (Appius and Virginia IV. 2.) 1654. Whose weapons have made passage for my soul That breaks from out the prison of my breast. PEELE (Alcazar v.) 1594.

My soul.... this lump of clay her prison.

MASSINGER (Believe as You List IV. 2.) 1631.) Think with how much unwillingness and anguish A glorified soul parted from the body Would to that loathsome jail again return. MIDDLETON (Mayor of Quinborough 1) 1661. SENSE-MOTION.

1

In the 1604 quarto of Hamlet there Occur the lines,

Sense, sure you have

Else could you not have motion.

I These views were very contrary to the theology of the time, and even of current creeds.

As Mr Edwin Reed points out, the commentators can make nothing of these words. "One of them suggests that for motion' we substitute notion; another, emotion. Others still contend that the misprint is in the first part of the sentence; that sense' must be understood to mean sensation or sensibility. Dr Ingleby is certain that Hamlet refers to the Queen's wanton impulse. The difficulty is complicated, too, by the fact that the lines were omitted from the revised version of the play in the folio of 1623, concerning which, however, the most daring commentator has not ventured to offer a remark. But in Bacon's prose works we find not only an explanation of the passage in the quarto, but also the reason why it was excluded from the folio. The Advancement of Learning was published in 1605, one year after the quarto of Hamlet containing the sentence in question appeared; but no repudiation of the old doctrine, that everything that has motion must have sense, is found in it. Indeed, Bacon seems to have had at that time.

lingering opinion that the doctrine is true, even as applied to the planets, in the influence which these wanderers were then supposed to exert over the affairs of men. But in 1623 he published a new edition of the Advancement in Latin, under the title of De Augmentis Scientiarum, and therein expressly declared that the doctrine is untrue; that there can be motion in inanimate bodies without sense, but with what he called a kind of perception. He said:

'Ignorance on this point drove some of the ancient philosophers to suppose that a soul is infused into all bodies without distinction ; for