From the short period which tradition allows us to suppose that our poet continued under the instruction of a master, we have a right to conclude that, notwithstanding his genius and industry, he must necessarily have made a very superficial acquaintance with the learned languages. That he was called home to assist his father, we are told by Mr. Rowe; and consequently, as the family was numerous and under the pressure of poverty, it is not likely that he found much time to prosecute what he had commenced at school. The accounts, therefore, which have descended to us, on the authority of Ben Jonson, Drayton, Suckling, &c. that he had not much learning, that he depended almost exclusively on his _native_ genius, (_that his Latin was small and his Greek less_,) ought to have been, without scruple, admitted. Fuller, who was a diligent and accurate enquirer, has given us in his Worthies, printed in 1662, the most full and express opinion on the subject. "He was an eminent instance," he remarks, "of the truth of that rule, _Poeta non fit, sed nascitur_; one is not _made_ but _born_ a poet. Indeed his learning was _very little_, so that as _Cornish diamonds_ are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, so _nature_ itself was all the _art_ which was used upon him."[29:A] Notwithstanding this uniform assertion of the contemporaries and immediate successors of Shakspeare, relative to his very imperfect knowledge of the languages of Greece and Rome, many of his modern commentators have strenuously insisted upon his intimacy with both, among whom may be enumerated, as the most zealous and decided on this point, the names of Gildon, Sewell, Pope, Upton, Grey, and Whalley. The dispute, however, has been nearly, if not altogether terminated, by the _Essay_ of Dr. Farmer _on the Learning of Shakspeare_, who has, by a mode of research equally ingenious and convincing, clearly proved that all the passages which had been triumphantly brought forward as instances of the classical literature of Shakspeare, were taken from translations, or from original, and once popular, productions in his native tongue. Yet the _conclusion_ drawn from this essay, so far as it respects the portion of latinity which our poet had acquired and preserved, as the result of his school-education, appears to us greatly too restricted. "_He remembered_," says the Doctor, "_perhaps enough of his school-boy learning to put the Hig, hag, hog, into the mouth of Sir Hugh Evans_:" and might pick up in the writers of the time, or the course of his conversation, a familiar phrase or two of French or Italian: but his studies were most demonstratively confined to nature and his own language.[30:A]