Conduct so absurd, coupled with some personal defects, and a character so petulantly vainglorious, exposed the “Resolute” to the bitter sarcasm of contemporary writers.  Accordingly we find him through life encompassed by a host of tormentors, and presenting his chevaux-de-frise of quills against them at all and every point.  In the Epistle Dedicatory to the second edition of his Dictionary, we find him engaged morsu et unguibus with a swarm of literary hornets, against whom he inveighs as “sea-dogs,—­land-critics, —­monsters of men, if not beasts rather than men,—­whose teeth are cannibals’,—­their tongues adders’ forks,—­their lips asps’ poison, —­their eyes basilisks’,—­their breath the breath of a grave,—­their words like swords of Turks, which strive which shall dive deepest into the Christian lying before them.”  Of a verity we may say that John Florio was sadly exercised when he penned this pungent paragraph.  He then falls foul of the players, who—­to use the technical phrase of the day—­“staged” him with no small success.  “With this common cry of curs” in general, and with one poet and one piece of said poet’s handiwork in particular, he enters into mortal combat with such vehement individuality as enables us at a glance to detect the offence and the offender.  He says, “Let Aristophanes and his comedians make plays and scour their mouths on Socrates, these very mouths they make to vilify shall be the means to amplify his virtues,” etc.  “And here,” says Doctor Warburton, “Shakspeare is so clearly marked out as not to be mistaken.”  This opinion is fortified by the concurrence of Farmer, Steevens, Reid, Malone, Knight, Collier, and Hunter; and, from the additional lights thrown upon this subject by their combined intelligence, no doubt seems to exist that Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster in “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” had his prototype in John Florio, the Resolute.

“Florio,” according to Farmer, “gave the first affront by asserting that ’the plays they play in England are neither right comedies nor tragedies, but representations of histories without any decorum.’” We know that Shakspeare must, of his own personal knowledge of the man, have been qualified to paint his character; for while the great dramatist was the early and intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton, the petulant lexicographer boasts of having for years been domesticated in the pay and patronage of that munificent patron of letters.  Warburton thinks “it was from the ferocity of his temper, that Shakspeare chose for him the name which Rabelais gives to his pedant of Thubal Holoferne.”  Were the matter worth arguing, we should say, it was rather from the proclivity with which (according to Camden’s rules) the abbreviated Latin name Johnes Florio or Floreo falls into Holofernes.  Rabelais and anagrammatism may divide the slender glory of the product between them.