conversation, it had that extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as remarkable originality of richly figured expressions, which is so characteristic of the style of Shakespeare’s plays.  In this prodigality he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks; “panting Time toils after him in vain,” and even the reader, much more the listener, might say, sufflaminandus est; “he needs to have the brake put on.” {287a}

Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will.  Only despair can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare, Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as “falling into those things which could not escape laughter . . . which were ridiculous.”  But to this last poor shift and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians and Baconians reduced.

Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.

But it is “impossible” that a man should have known so much, especially of classical literature and courtly ways, and foreign manners and phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five years at a Latin school, and five or six years in that forcing-house of faculty, the London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.

“With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished,” says a contemporary. {288a} If a doubter will look at the cheap and common books of that day (a play in quarto, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold for fippence) in any great collection; he will not marvel that to a lover of books, poor as he might be, many were accessible.  Such a man cannot be kept from books.

If the reader will look into “the translations and imitations of the classics which poured from the press . . . the poems and love-pamphlets and plays of the University wits” (when these chanced to be printed), “the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste,” {288b} he will understand the literary soil in which the genius of Shakespeare blossomed as rapidly as the flowers in “Adonis’ garden.”  The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic dicta—­a world of knowledge of a kind then “in widest commonalty spread,” but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore seems recondite learning.

The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to “dispute their way through Europe,” made the Italian tour, and, notoriously, were “Italianate.”  They would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence, Venice, and Rome.  Actors visited Denmark and Germany.  No man at home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious Venetian “tranect or common ferry,” the gondolas, and the Rialto.  There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the foreign wars.  Only dullards, or the unthinking,