*Fortnightly Review, April 1903.

In a letter of Sturley's, eximiae is spelled eximie, without the
digraph, a thing then most usual, and no disproof of Sturley's
Latinity.* The Shakspearean hypothesis is that Shakespeare was
rather a cleverer man than Quiney and Sturley, and, consequently,
that, if he went to school, he probably learned more by a great deal
than they did. There was no reason why he should not acquire Latin
enough to astonish modern reviewers, who have often none at all.

*Webb, p. 14. Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, i. p.
150, ii. p. 57.

Judge Webb then discusses the learning of Shakespeare, and easily
shows that he was full of mythological lore. So was all Elizabethan
literature. Every English scribbler then knew what most men have
forgotten now. Nobody was forced to go to the original authorities-
-say, Plato, Herodotus, and Plutarch--for what was accessible in
translations, or had long before been copiously decanted into
English prose and poetry. Shakespeare could get Rhodope, not from
Pliny, but from B. R.'s lively translation (1584) of the first two
books of Herodotus. 'Even Launcelot Gobbo talks of Scylla and
Charybdis,' says Judge Webb. Who did not? Had the Gobbos not known
about Scylla and Charybdis, Shakespeare would not have lent them the
knowledge.

The mythological legends were 'in the air,' familiar to all the
Elizabethan world. These allusions are certainly no proof 'of
trained scholarship or scientific education.' In five years of
contact with the stage, with wits, with writers for the stage, with