Our excellent friend Mr. Hurd hath born a noble testimony on our side of the question. “Shakespeare,” says this true Critick, “owed the felicity of freedom from the bondage of classical superstition to the _want_ of what is called the _advantage_ of a learned Education.—This, as well as a vast superiority of Genius, hath contributed to lift this astonishing man to the glory of being esteemed the most original _thinker_ and _speaker_, since the times of Homer.” And hence indisputably the amazing Variety of Style and Manner, unknown to all other Writers: an argument of _itself_ sufficient to emancipate Shakespeare from the supposition of a _Classical training_. Yet, to be honest, _one_ Imitation is _fastened_ on our Poet: which hath been insisted upon likewise by Mr. Upton and Mr. Whalley. You remember it in the famous Speech of Claudio in _Measure for Measure_: Ay, but to die and go we know not where! &c. Most certainly the Ideas of a “Spirit bathing in fiery floods,” of residing “in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,” or of being “imprisoned in the viewless winds,” are not _original_ in our Author; but I am not sure that they came from the _Platonick Hell_ of Virgil. The Monks also had their hot and their cold Hell, “The fyrste is fyre that ever brenneth, and never gyveth lighte,” says an old Homily:—“The seconde is passyng colde, that yf a grete hylle of fyre were casten therin, it sholde torne to yce.” One of their Legends, well remembered in the time of Shakespeare, gives us a Dialogue between a Bishop and a Soul tormented in a piece of ice, which was brought to cure _a grete brenning heate_ in his foot: take care you do not interpret this the _Gout_, for I remember M. Menage quotes a _Canon_ upon us, Si quis dixerit Episcopum PODAGRA laborare, Anathema sit. Another tells us of the Soul of a Monk fastened to a Rock, which the winds were to blow about for a twelve-month, and purge of it’s Enormities. Indeed this doctrine was before now introduced into poetick fiction, as you may see in a Poem, “where the Lover declareth his pains to exceed far the pains of Hell,” among the many miscellaneous ones subjoined to the Works of Surrey. Nay, a very learned and inquisitive Brother-Antiquary, our Greek Professor, hath observed to me on the authority of Blefkenius, that this was the ancient opinion of the inhabitants of Iceland; who were certainly very little read either in the _Poet_ or the _Philosopher_. After all, Shakespeare’s curiosity might lead him to _Translations_. Gawin Douglas really changes the _Platonick Hell_ into the “punytion of Saulis in Purgatory”: and it is observable that when the Ghost informs Hamlet of his Doom there, Till the foul crimes done in his days of nature Are _burnt and purg’d away_,——