"3. Plautus who was an exact Commedian, yet never any Scholar, as one Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself. Adde to all these that, though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by his Tragedies; so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at his Comedies, they were so merry; and Democritus scarce forbear to sigh at his tragedies, they were so mournfull. "He was an eminent instance 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. Many were the wet-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I beheld like a Spanish great gallion and an English man of war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. He died Anno Domini... and was buried at Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of his nativity." Ben begins:= ````"Here lies Ben Jonson, ````Who was once one--"= Shakespeare concludes:= ```"That while he lived, was a slow thing, ```And now, being dead, is no-thing."= This being the sort of literature which William Shakespeare's pen turned out during his residence in London, he could manage very well without a library. And it was the most natural thing in the world that, after retiring to the shade of Stratford, it should have produced, on occasion, the famous epitaphs on his friends Elias James and "Thinbeard." At all events, this is a simpler explanation than the "deterioration of power," for which no one has assigned a sufficient reason," which Halliwell * was driven to assume in order {271}to account for this drivel from the pen which had written "Hamlet." * "Life of Shakespeare," p. 270. London, 1848.