A startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, concerning compositions which Judge Holmes has demonstrated are crowded with classical borrowings, imitations drawn from works untranslated from their originals at the date when quoted; so that it would be impossible to say that the quoter found them in English works and took them with no knowledge of their original source! * "Nature itself was all his art," says Fuller, and Denham, again, asserts that "all he [Shakespeare] has was from old mother witt." ** And Dominie Ward says, to the same effect, in his diary, "I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural witt, without any art at all;" *** though, of course, this was, and could have been, nothing more than matter of report. * See Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, p. 5. ** Farmer, p. 13. *** "Diary of Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, extending from 1648 to 1679," p. 183; London, 1839, p. 30. Shakespeare took his "Taming of the Shrew" from Greene's "Taming of A Shrew," there being no copyright to prevent. It is probable that, in the production of these plays, 'William Shakespeare was not always scrupulous to compose "without blotting out a line" himself. That he was a reckless borrower, and scissored unconscionably from Robert Greene and others (so much so that {266}Greene wrote a whole book in protest), we have Greene's book itself to testify. From its almost unintelligible pages we can glean some idea of the turgid English of the day. It was, of course, in the composition of this popular English that Shakespeare, by surpassing Greene, awakened the latter's jealousy. Otherwise, there would have been no superiority in Shakespeare over Greene which Greene could have perceived: or, at least, no cutting into Greene's profits wherein Greene could have found cause for jealousy. For, if Greene had continued to earn money indifferently to whether Shakespeare carried on his trade or not, he would not have been "jealous." But so fluent and clever a fellow as this William Shakespeare of Stratford, who could hold, when a mere boy, his rustic audience with a speech over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous rival among the hackney stock-playwrights of London, and would easily have made himself invaluable to his management by dashing off scores of such local sketches as "The Hog hath lost his Pearl," suggested by the current events of the day.