* * * * * We may now leave types of literary creation and deal with individual authors. It would require a whole book for each of the greater names, if we sought to discover how much of matter or form each owes directly or indirectly to Greece. Mr. Churton Collins has written one such book on Tennyson. Here our survey must be but very superficial, as befits an introduction to the study. Of Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_, _Daphnaida_, and _Astrophel_ something has been said. It remains to observe that his _Faerie Queene_ is but one mass of scenes, events, and images borrowed from sources in Italy and Greece, and that the hint for the whole design was suggested by his studies in Aristotle; for he says, “I labour to pourtraict in Arthur the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral vertues, as Aristotle hath devised.” Of the Greek manner, its proportion and moderation, Spenser has unhappily learned little or nothing. Shakespeare was, in one sense, no Grecian. Sundry of his Roman plots, _Coriolanus_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_ for example, he takes from North’s translation of the Greek Plutarch; a certain amount of Greek mythology and history reveals itself incidentally; but he owes less to Greece and more to his own genius acting upon desultory reading, than other writers of the time or since. Dryden, indeed, in his adaptation of _Troilus and Cressida_ makes him say: Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age, I found not, but created first, the stage; And if I drained no Greek or Latin store, ’Twas that my own abundance gave me more. But this is hardly the truth. One immensely important thing Shakespeare did owe to Greece, through scholars who were his own immediate predecessors, and that was the general shape and form of the poetic drama.