Meanwhile we shall compare the assertions of the laborious Mr.
Holmes, the American author of 'The Authorship of Shakespeare'
(third edition, 1875), and of the ingenious Mr. Donnelly, the
American author of 'The Great Cryptogram.' Both, alas! derive in
part from the ignorance of Pope. Pope had said: 'Shakespeare
follows the Greek authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius.' Mr.
Smith cites this nonsense; so do Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Holmes. Now
the so-called Dares Phrygius is not a Greek author. No Greek
version of his early mediaeval romance, 'De Bello Trojano,' exists.
The matter of the book found its way into Chaucer, Boccaccio,
Lydgate, Guido de Colonna, and other authors accessible to one who
had no Greek at all, while no Greek version of Dares was accessible
to anybody.* Some recent authors, English and American, have gone
on, with the credulity of 'the less than half educated,' taking a
Greek Dares for granted, on the authority of Pope, whose Greek was
'small.' They have clearly never looked at a copy of Dares, never
known that the story attributed to Dares was familiar, in English
and French, to everybody. Mr. Holmes quotes Pope, Mr. Donnelly
quotes Mr. Holmes, for this Greek Dares Phrygius. Probably
Shakespeare had Latin enough to read the pseudo-Dares, but probably
he did not take the trouble.

*See Brandes, William Shakespeare, ii. 198-202.

This example alone proves that men who are not scholars venture to
pronounce on Shakespeare's scholarship, and that men who take absurd
statements at second hand dare to constitute themselves judges of a
question of evidence and of erudition.

The worthy Mr. Donnelly then quotes Mr. Holmes for Shakespeare's