“For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.” One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels. But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations. To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names. The situations, in _Hamlet_ and the _Choephoræ_ and _Electra_, are so close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon. Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and _Beowulf_ and the Njal’s saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish _Tain Bo Cualgne_, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar. But no student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels knew Greek. The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick’s _The Heroic Age_ (1912), especially Chapter XV, “The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be added. But, to be short, Mr. Collins’s case can only be judged by readers of his most interesting _Studies in Shakespeare_. To me, Hamlet’s soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the _Phœnix_ of Euripides no more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the text that “of death we know nothing” are bound to do,—though Shakespeare’s are infinitely the richer. For Shakespeare’s reflections on death, save where Christians die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-Æschylean Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves, Shakespeare’s highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone. But of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way, a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet’s lines on old age, _sine amore jocisque_, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr. Collins states the hypothesis—not his own—“that _by a certain natural affinity_ Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek tragedy.”