glorified by poetry,--and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from
Lucretius or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out
and study the Latin passages which he does not quote. So arbitrary
is taste in these matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but
independently, finds Shakespeare putting a thought from the
Alcibiades I of Plato into the mouth of Achilles in Troilus and
Cressida, while Mr. J. M. Robertson suggests that the borrowing is
from Seneca--where Mr. Collins does not find "the smallest parallel."
Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author of Troilus makes Ulysses
quote Plato as "the author" of a remark, and makes Achilles take up
the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.

Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are
taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by
the Achaeans!

There were Latin translations of Plato; the Alcibiades I was
published apart, from Ficinus' version, in 1560, with the sub-title,
Concerning the Nature of Man. Who had read it?--Shakespeare, or one
of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another Troilus and
Cressida (now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood's Unknown? Which of
these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long
before Homer? Which of them followed the Ionic and mediaeval anti-
Achaean view of Homer's heroes, as given in the Troy Books of the
Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom
the Ionian tradition abhors? Troilus and Cressida is indeed a
mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus' version of
the Alcibiades; {75a} and yet made the monstrous anachronism of
dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war. "That was his
fun," as Charles Lamb said in another connection.