We need not pursue the allusions later than Shakespeare’s death, or invoke, at present, Ben Jonson’s panegyric of 1623. As to Davies, his dull and obscure epigram is addressed “To our English Terence, Mr. Will Shake-speare.” He accosts Shakespeare as “Good Will.” He remarks that, “as some say,” if Will “had not played some Kingly parts in sport,” he had been “a companion for a _King_,” and “been a King among the meaner sort.” Nobody, now, can see the allusion and the joke. Shakespeare’s company, in 1604, acted a play on the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600. King James suppressed the play after the second night, as, of course, he was brought on the stage throughout the action: and in very droll and dreadful situations. Did Will take the King’s part, and annoy gentle King Jamie, “as some say”? Nobody knows. But Mr. Greenwood, to disable Davies’s recognition of Mr. Will as a playwright, “Our English Terence,” quotes, from Florio’s _Montaigne_, a silly old piece of Roman literary gossip, Terence’s plays were written by Scipio and Laelius. In fact, Terence alludes in his prologue to the _Adelphi_, to a spiteful report that he was aided by great persons. The prologue may be the source of the fable—that does not matter. Davies might get the fable in Montaigne, and, knowing that some Great One wrote Will’s plays, might therefore, in irony, address him as “Our English Terence.” This is a pretty free conjecture! In Roman comedy he had only two names known to him to choose from; he took Terence, not Plautus. But if Davies was in the great Secret, a world of others must have shared _le Secret de Polichinelle_. Yet none hints at it, and only a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a straw as the off-chance that Davies _knew_, and used “Terence” as a gibe. {149a} The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the actor wrote the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have done so, and therefore that he was not so ignorant and bookless as to demonstrate that he was incapable of the poetry and the knowledge displayed in his works. Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when he makes Will incapable of writing. Such a Will could deceive no mortal. {150a} But does Mr. Greenwood, who finds in the Author of the plays “much learning, and remarkable classical attainments,” or “a wide familiarity with the classics,” {150b} suppose that his absolutely bookless Will could have persuaded his intimates that he was the author of plays exhibiting “a wide familiarity with the classics,” or “remarkable classical attainments.” The thing is wholly impossible.