_Eno._ I will tell you. The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick; with them the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water, which they beat, to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar'd all description: she did lie In her pavilion, (cloth of gold, of tissue,) O'er-picturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork Nature: on each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-color'd fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid, did. _Agr._ Oh, rare for Antony! _Eno._ Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, And made their bends adornings: at the helm A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthron'd i' th' market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in Nature. _Antony and Cleopatra_. Act II. Sc. 2. The operations of Shakespeare's creative imagination are rarely to be observed more distinctly than in such instances as this, where we see the precise source from which he drew, in all its original limitations and native character. Books were to him like ingots of gold, which, passing through the mint of his brain, came out thence stamped coin, current for all time. Viewing some of his plays, it may be said, with no real, though with apparent contradiction, that no man ever borrowed more from books, and yet none ever owed less to them. For the Roman times Plutarch served him, as Holinshed and Hall supplied him for his English histories. Under Plutarch's guidance he walked through the streets of ancient Rome, and became familiar with the conduct of her men. He is more Roman than Plutarch himself, and by divine right of imagination he makes himself a citizen of the Eternal City. While Shakespeare was using Plutarch to such advantage, on the other hand, Ben Jonson seems to have borrowed little or nothing from him in his Roman plays. He got what he wanted out of the Latin authors, and he succeeded in Latinizing his plays,--in giving to his characters the dress, but not the spirit of Rome.