throughout; with what amount of success every reader must judge for
himself.

He thinks it "surely not unlikely" that Polonius's


"Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,"


may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (Trinummus, iv.
3). Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if ever there
were a well-known reflection from experience it is this of the
borrowers and lenders.

Next, take this of Plautus (Pseudolus, I, iv. 7-10), "But just as the
poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists nowhere among
men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which is mere
fiction." We are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus's
theory of the origin of the belief in fairies:


"And as imagination bodies forth
The FORMS of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to SHAPES, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."


The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth FORMS, and the poet's
pen turns them to SHAPES. But to suppose that Shakespeare here