odi puer apparatus” (Odes.  I, xxxviii.  I).  Mr. Collins quotes Lear (iii, vi. 85) thus, “You will say they are Persian attire.”  Really, Lear in his wild way says to Edgar, “I do not like the fashion of your garments:  you will say they are Persian; but let them be changed.”  Mr. Collins changes this into “you will say they are Persian attire,” a phrase “which could only have occurred to a classical scholar.”  The phrase is not in Shakespeare, and Lear’s wandering mind might as easily select “Persian” as any other absurdity.

So it is throughout.  Two great poets write on the fear of death, on the cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination in nature, on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas, glorified by poetry,—­and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study the Latin passages which he does not quote.  So arbitrary is taste in these matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently, finds Shakespeare putting a thought from the Alcibiades I of Plato into the mouth of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, while Mr. J. M. Robertson suggests that the borrowing is from Seneca—­where Mr. Collins does not find “the smallest parallel.”  Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author of Troilus makes Ulysses quote Plato as “the author” of a remark, and makes Achilles take up the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.

Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by the Achaeans!

There were Latin translations of Plato; the Alcibiades I was published apart, from Ficinus’ version, in 1560, with the sub-title, Concerning the Nature of Man.  Who had read it?—­Shakespeare, or one of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another Troilus and Cressida (now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown?  Which of these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long before Homer?  Which of them followed the Ionic and mediaeval anti-Achaean view of Homer’s heroes, as given in the Troy Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors?  Troilus and Cressida is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus’ version of the Alcibiades; {75a} and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war.  “That was his fun,” as Charles Lamb said in another connection.

Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the “small Latin” with which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare.  He could read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads French—­that is, as easily as he reads English.  Still further, Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with the Greek drama “that the characteristics which differentiate his work from the work of his contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of the Greek dramatists are actually attributable to these dramatists.”