Now this speech, it may be contended, is but a good-natured parody of Shakespeare's travesty of the Iliad story, as he wrote it in answer to Chapman's absurd claim for the sanctity of Homer's characters. Shakespeare's consciousness of power might naturally have incited him to place himself immediately by the side of Homer, but it is more likely that he was interested in the ethical than in the personal point of view. Unlike most of his plays, as Dr. Ward has pointed out, this comedy follows no single original source accurately, because the author's satire was more topical than anything he had previously attempted, except, perhaps, in "Love's Labour's Lost." But Shakespeare for once had miscalculated not his own powers, but the powers of the "grand censors," who could suppress plays which reflected upon the morality or politics of those who moved in high places; nor had he sufficiently allowed for the hostility of the "sinners who lived in the suburbs." Shakespeare, indeed, found one of the most striking compositions of his genius disliked and condemned not from its lack of merit, but for reasons that Jonson so forcibly points out in words put into the mouth of Virgil: "'Tis not the wholesome sharp morality, Or modest anger of a satiric spirit, That hurts or wounds the body of the state; But the sinister application Of the malicious, ignorant, and base Interpreter, who will distort and strain The general scope and purpose of an author To his particular and private spleen." The stigma that rested on Shakespeare in his lifetime for having written this play rests on him still, for some unintelligible reason, since no man ever sat down to put his thoughts on paper with a loftier motive. But so it is! Then, as now, whenever a dramatist attempts to be teacher and preacher, all the other teachers and preachers in the world hold up their hands in horror and exclaim: "What impiety! What stupendous ignorance!" * * * * *