I will not affirm that of _Shakespear_; I believe he was able to do what Pedants call construe, but that he was able to read _Plautus_ without Pain and Difficulty I can never believe. Now I appeal to you, Sir, what time he had between his Writing and his Acting, to read any thing that could not be read with Ease and Pleasure. We see that our Adversaries themselves acknowledge, that if _Shakespear_ was able to read _Plautus_ with Ease, nothing in Latinity could be hard to him. How comes it to pass then, that he has given us no Proofs of his familiar Acquaintance with the Ancients, but this Imitation of the _Menechmi_, and a Version of two Epistles of _Ovid_? How comes it that he had never read _Horace_, of a superiour Merit to either, and particularly his Epistle to the _Piso’s_, which so much concern’d his Art? Or if he had read that Epistle, how comes it that in his _Troylus_ and _Cressida_ [we must observe by the way, that when _Shakespear_ wrote that Play, _Ben Johnson_ had not as yet translated that Epistle] he runs counter to the Instructions which _Horace_ has given for the forming the Character of _Achilles_? Scriptor: Honoratum si forte reponis Achillem, Impiger, Iracundus, Inexorabilis, Acer, Jura neget sibi nata. Where is the _Impiger_, the _Iracundus_, or the _Acer_, in the Character of _Shakespear_’s _Achilles_? who is nothing but a drolling, lazy, conceited, overlooking Coxcomb; so far from being the honoured _Achilles_, the Epithet that _Homer_ and _Horace_ after him give him, that he is deservedly the Scorn and the Jest of the rest of the Characters, even to that Buffoon _Thersites_.