Greeks and Trojans cite Plato and Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida,
while Plato and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the
latest conceivable date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly
suppose that a scholar would have permitted to himself the freak, any
more than that in The Winter's Tale he should have borrowed from an
earlier novel the absurdity of calling Delphi "Delphos" (a non-
existent word), of confusing "Delphos" with Delos, and placing the
Delphian Oracle in an island. In the same play the author, quite
needlessly, makes the artist Giulio Romano (1492-1546) contemporary
with the flourishing age of the oracle of the Pythian Apollo. This,
at least, would not be ignorance.

We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben's inability to refrain
from gibes at Shakspere's want of scholarship. Rowe, who had
traditions of Davenant's, tells how, in conversation with Suckling,
Davenant, Endymion Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on Will's
want of learning; and how Hales snubbed him. Indeed, Ben could have
made mirth enough out of The Winter's Tale. For, granting to Mr.
Greenwood {45a} that "the mention of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of
a much earlier date, and under the reign of Ottocar (1255-78) Bohemia
extended from the Adriatic to the shores of the Baltic," that only
makes matters far worse. "Delphos" never was a place-name; there was
no oracle on the isle of "Delphos"; there were no Oracles in 1255-78
(A.D.); and Perdita, who could have sat for her portrait to Giulio
Romano, was contemporary with an Oracle at Delphos, but not with
Ottocar.

There never was so mad a mixture, not even in Ivanhoe; not even in
Kenilworth. Scott erred deliberately, as he says in his prefaces;
but Will took the insular oracle of Delphos from Greene, inserted