Collins states the hypothesis--not his own--"that BY A CERTAIN
NATURAL AFFINITY Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well
as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek tragedy."

Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins's long array of Greek
parallels, I do hold that by "natural affinity," by congruity of
genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians.

One thing seems certain to me. If Shakspere read and borrowed from
Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew
it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins's extraordinary
tenacity of memory.

Now if "Shakespeare" did all that, he was not the actor. The author,
on Mr. Collins's showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent
student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its
fragments. The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from
Bacon's works, that he was such a student.

Mr. Collins, "a violent Stratfordian," overproved his case. If his
proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as
well as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were so
learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion--he WAS, in the
opinion of Mr. Collins.

If Shakespeare's spirit and those of Sophocles and AEschylus meet, it
is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with "the
poet's sad lucidity" the same "pageant of men's miseries." But how
dissimilar in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart
from the austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins's