The same affinity for the Roman mind, and the same want of sympathy with the Greek, we again find in Bacon's greatest contemporary, whose imagination took as broad and comprehensive a view as Bacon's intellect. Indeed, how could a Bacon attain that position with respect to Greek poetry that was unattainable by the mighty imagination of a Shakspeare? For in Shakspeare, at any rate, the imagination of the Greek antiquity could be met by a homogeneous power of the same rank as itself; and, as the old adage says, "like comes to like." But the age, the spirit of the nation--in a word, all those forces of which the genius of an individual man is composed, and which, moreover, genius is least able to resist--had here placed an obstacle, impenetrable both to the poet and the philosopher. Shakspeare was no more able to exhibit Greek characters than Bacon to expound Greek poetry. Like Bacon, Shakspeare had in his turn of mind something that was Roman, and not at all akin to the Greek. He could appropriate to himself a Coriolanus and a Brutus, a Cæsar and an Antony; he could succeed with the Roman heroes of Plutarch, but not with the Greek heroes of Homer. The latter he could only parody, but his parody was as infelicitous as Bacon's explanation of the "Wisdom of the Ancients." Those must be dazzled critics indeed who can persuade themselves that the heroes of the Iliad are excelled by the caricatures in "Troilus and Cressida." The success of such a parody was poetically impossible; indeed, he that attempts to parody Homer shows thereby that he has not understood him. For the simple and the naïve do not admit of a parody, and these have found in Homer their eternal and inimitable expression. Just as well might caricatures be made of the statues of Phidias. Where the creative imagination never ceases to be simple and naïve, where it never distorts itself by the affected or the unnatural, there is the consecrated land of poetry, in which there is no place for the parodist. On the other hand, where there is a palpable want of simplicity and nature, parody is perfectly conceivable; nay, may even be felt as a poetical necessity. Thus Euripides, who, often enough, was neither simple nor naïve, could be parodied, and Aristophanes has shown us with what felicity. Even Æschylus, who was not always as simple as he was grand, does not completely escape the parodising test. But Homer is safe. To parody Homer is to mistake him, and to stand so far beyond his scope that the truth and magic of his poetry can no longer be felt; and this is the position of Shakespeare and Bacon. The imagination of Homer, and all that could be contemplated and felt by that imagination, namely, the classical antiquity of the Greeks, are to them utterly foreign. We cannot understand Aristotle without Plato; nay, I maintain that we cannot contemplate with a sympathetic mind the Platonic world of ideas, if we have not previously sympathised with the world of the Homeric gods.