Shakespeare, though cultivating, it may be, little direct acquaintance with the classical writers, followed the general practice. He has built up some of the finest of his Tragedies, if not with chorus, and semi-chorus, strophe, anti-strophe, and epode, like the Athenian models, yet with a wonderfully exact appreciation of the characters of antiquity, and with a delineating power surprisingly true to history and to the leading events and circumstances in the lives of the personages whom he introduces. From possessing full and adequate scholarship, Giovio, Domenichi, Claude Mignault, Whitney, and others of the Emblem schools, went immediately to the original sources of information. Shakespeare, we may admit, could do this only in a limited degree, and generally availed himself of assistance from the learned translators of ancient authors. Most marvellously does he transcend them in the creative attributes of high genius: they supplied the rough marble, blocks of Parian perchance, and a few tools more or less suited to the work; but it was himself, his soul and intellect and good right arm, which have produced almost living and moving forms,— “See, my lord, Would you not deem it breath’d? and that those veins Did verily bear blood?” _Winter’s Tale_, act v. sc. 3, l. 63. For Medeia, one of the heroines of Euripides, and for Æneas and Anchises in their escape from Troy, Alciat (Emblem 54), and his close imitator Whitney (p. 33), give each an emblem. To the first the motto is,— “_Ei qui semel sua prodegerit, aliena credi non oportere_,”— “To that man who has once squandered his own, another person’s ought not to be entrusted,”— similar, as a counterpart, to the Saviour’s words (_Luke_ xvi. 12), “If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own.” The device is,— [Illustration: _Alicat, 1581._] with the following Latin elegiacs,— COLCHIDOS _in gremio nidum quid congeris? eheu Neſcia cur pullos tam malè credis auis? Dira parens Medea ſuos ſæuiſſima natos Perdidit; & ſperas parcat vt illa tuis?_ Which Whitney (p. 33) considerably amplifies,— “MEDEA loe with infante in her arme, Whoe kil’de her babes, shee shoulde haue loued beste: The swallowe yet, whoe did suspect no harme, Hir Image likes, and hatch’d vppon her breste:[108] And lifte her younge, vnto this tirauntes guide, Whoe, peecemeale did her proper fruicte deuide. Oh foolishe birde, think’ste thow, shee will haue care, Vppon thy yonge? Whoe hathe her owne destroy’de, And maie it bee, that shee thie birdes should spare? Whoe slue her owne, in whome shee shoulde haue ioy’d. Thow arte deceau’de, and arte a warninge good, To put no truste, in them that hate theire blood.”