Referring to Jonson’s _Poetaster_, and to _Satiromastix_, the counter-attack, we find a passage in the Cambridge play, _The Return from Parnassus_ (about 1602). Burbage, the tragic actor, and Kempe, the low-comedy man of Shakespeare’s company, are introduced, discussing the possible merits of Cambridge wits as playwrights. Kempe rejects them as they “smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis . . . ” The purpose, of course, is to laugh at the ignorance of the low-comedy man, who thinks “Metamorphosis” a writer, and does not suspect—how should he?—that Shakespeare “smells of Ovid.” Kempe innocently goes on, “Why, here’s our fellow” (comrade) “Shakespeare puts them all down” (all the University playwrights), “aye, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace” (in _The Poetaster_) “giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge . . . ” The Cambridge author, perhaps, is thinking of the pill (not purge) which, in _Satiromastix_, might be administered to Jonson. The Cambridge author may have thought that Shakespeare wrote the passage on the pill which was to “fetch up” masses of Ben’s insolence, self-love, arrogance, and detraction. If this be not the sequence of ideas, it is not easy to understand how or why Kempe is made to say that Shakespeare has given Jonson a purge. Stupid old nonsense! There are other more or less obscure indications of Jonson’s spite, during the stage-quarrel, against Shakespeare, but the most unmistakable proof lies in his verses in “Poet-Ape.” I am aware that Ben’s intention here to hit at Shakespeare has been denied, for example by Mr. Collins with his usual vigour of language. But though I would fain agree with him, the object of attack can be no known person save Will. Jonson was already, in _The Poetaster_, using the term “_Poet-Ape_,” for he calls the actors at large “apes.” Jonson thought so well of his rhymes that he included them in the Epigrams of his first Folio (1616). By that date, the year of Shakespeare’s death, if he really loved Shakespeare, as he says, in verse and prose, Ben might have suppressed the verses. But (as Drummond noted) he preferred his jest, such as it was, to his friend; who was not, as usually understood, a man apt to resent a very blunt shaft of very obsolete wit. Like Molière, Shakespeare had outlived the charge of plagiarism, made long ago by the jealous Ben. Poet-Ape is an actor-playwright “_that would be thought our chief_”—words which, by 1601, could only apply to Shakespeare; there was no rival, save Ben, near his throne. The playwright-actor, too, has now confessedly “grown To a little wealth and credit in the scene,” of no other actor-playwright could this be said.