spoke slightingly of Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek,” which is all that his plays would lead us to credit him with. His liberal use of translations, and his indebtedness to North’s translations of _Plutarch’s Lives_, also substantiates this theory. We cannot regard, as a great scholar, an author who “gives Bohemia a coast line, makes Cleopatra play billiards, mixes his Latin, and mulls his Greek.” Mr. Reginald Haines, who has made a study of Shakespeare for the express purpose of testing his classical attainments, denies emphatically that he shows any acquaintance with Greek at all. His conclusions are worthy of consideration: “Of course there are common allusions to Greek history and mythology such as every poet would have at command, but no reference at first hand to any Greek writer.... As far as I know there are but four real Greek words to be found in Shakespeare’s works--_threne_, _cacodemon_, _practic_, and _theoric_. It is impossible to suppose that Bacon could have veiled his classical knowledge so successfully in so extensive a field for its display, or that he could, for instance, have perpetrated such a travesty of Homer as appears in _Troilus and Cressida_. With Latin, the case is somewhat different. Shakespeare certainly knew a little grammar-school Latin. He was familiar with Ovid, and even quotes him in the original; and he certainly knew Virgil, and Seneca, Cæsar, and something of Terence and Horace, and, as I myself believe, of Juvenal. But he very rarely quotes Latin, unless it be a proverb or some stock quotation from Mantuanus or a tag from a Latin grammar. When he uses conversational Latin, as in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, the idiom is shaky. The quotations from Horace, &c., in _Titus Andronicus_ are certainly not by Shakespeare. Nor are the Latinisms like “palliament” in that play. Still he has a very large vocabulary of Latin words such as _renege_, to _gust_ (taste), and we may fairly say that Shakespeare knew Latin as well as many sixth form boys, but not as a scholar.” Two years ago a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, who had gone through all the alleged examples of erudition and evidences of wide and accurate classical scholarship in the Shakespearean plays, showed them to be entirely imaginary.