the Histories and Tragedies, where it appears unpaged after having been removed from its original position among the Tragedies. No mention is made of it in the contents of the volume. In the folio the play is called a tragedy, which, if a correct title, is not the one given to it in the 1609 preface. Now, in the Epilogue to "Henry IV., Part Two," we have this allusion to a recently acted play by Shakespeare, which had not been well received by the audience, "Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it and to promise you a better. I meant, indeed, to pay you with this." And in 1903 Mr. Arthur Acheson, of Chicago, in his book on "Shakespeare and the Rival Poet," advanced the theory (1) that this "displeasing play," was "Troilus and Cressida"; (2) that it was written at some time between the autumn of 1598 and the spring of 1599; (3) that it preceded and did not follow Ben Jonson's "Poetaster," and therefore had nothing to do with the "War of the Theatres"; (4) that it was written to ridicule Chapman's fulsome praise of Homer and his Greek heroes--praise which was displayed in his prefaces to the seven books of the Iliad issued in that year. On this point Mr. Acheson says, forcibly: "Chapman claims supremacy for Homer, not only as a poet, but as a moralist, and extends his claims for moral altitude to include the heroes of his epics. Shakespeare divests the Greek heroes of the glowing, but misty, nimbus of legend and mythology, and presents them to us in the light of common day, and as men in a world of men. In a modern Elizabethan setting he pictures these Greeks and Trojans, almost exactly as they appear in the sources from which he works. He does not stretch the truth of what he finds, nor draw wilfully distorted pictures, and yet, the Achilles, the Ulysses, the Ajax, etc., which we find in the play, have lost their demigodlike pose. How does he do it? The masterly realistic and satirical effect he produces comes wholly from a changed point of view. He displays pagan Greek and Trojan life in action--with its low ideals of religion, womanhood, and honour, with its bloodiness and sensuality--upon a background from which he has eliminated historical perspective." Nor is this explanation inapplicable when we realize how exaggerated are Chapman's eulogies on Homer. To take as an instance the following passage: