Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels
between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between
Homer and Beowulf and the Njal's saga, yet Norsemen and the early
Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on
one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon
epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from
Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar. But no
student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I
think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels
knew Greek. The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick's The Heroic
Age (1912), especially Chapter XV, "The Common Characteristics of
Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry," and to what Mr. Chadwick says much
might be added.

But, to be short, Mr. Collins's case can only be judged by readers of
his most interesting Studies in Shakespeare. To me, Hamlet's
soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the Phoenix of Euripides
no more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the
text that "of death we know nothing" are bound to do,--though
Shakespeare's are infinitely the richer. For Shakespeare's
reflections on death, save where Christians die in a Christian
spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-AEschylean Greek and
early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves,
Shakespeare's highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone. But of
all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats,
who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way, a peculiar vein of
Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely
Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian
poet's lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from
Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr.