traced backwards to the conventional Plautine comedy. Dr. Landmann (quoted by Furness) says that "Lyly's style is free from Latin and Latin quotations." He is speaking of Euphues, but the remark is very misleading, since some of Lyly's plays (Gallathea, Endymion) are notable in this respect. These may be later than Shakespeare's play, but probably Endymion is not. Lyly's Campaspe (printed in 1584) exhibits the taint in the first scene of the second Act. These Latin scraps are, as I have said, often given to the pages, and in Endymion Sir Tophas, the "Bragging Soldier," says to a brace of these tender juveniles: "The Latine hath saved your lives, the which a world of silver could not have done. I understand you, and pardon ye." See, too, Edwards' Damon and Pythias (ante 1566). Moth gives us minime and unum cita (= unciatim). Was this fashion evidence of the fact that the youngsters usually belonged to the educated classes, fresh from school? Lyly says of one of them: "He learned his leere of my sonne whom I have brought up in Oxford" (Mother Bombie). This one had quoted "Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus." In this play also Lyly gives us more elaborate and heart-scalding puns than any in Shakespeare. The mythological allusions in Shakespeare's early Italianated work are altogether in Lyly's style. Peele's Edward the First is also decorated with Latin scraps. It was printed in 1593, but belongs to the Spanish Armada period. But there is a better parallel than any of these, which precedes them all, with the exception of Edwards' play, by several years. I refer to Sir Philip Sidney's May Lady, a dramatic interlude shown before the queen at Wanstead in 1578. Before speaking of it let us, however, consider another point bearing upon the same subject.

There was a considerably earlier interpretation of a character in this play than that dealing with Armado. This was that of Warburton, who confidently asserted that Holofernes was John Florio, the Italian teacher and dictionary writer and the well-known translator of Montaigne's Essays. Warburton stated that the year after Love's Labour's Lost appeared (1597) " comes out our John Florio, with his World of Words [in 1598], recentibus odiis; and in the preface, quoted above,

falls upon the comic poet for bringing him upon the stage. ... Here Shakespeare is so plainly marked out as not to be mistaken" (Steevens' Shakespeare [1793], v. 256, 257). Dr. Johnson immediately disagreed, and so did Malone. Farmer and Steevens followed Warburton. Warburton's whole fabric (it is of considerable length) is well pulled to pieces by Furness, who shows the misrepresentations of Florio's words which Warburton was guilty of; for the latter referred obviously to some other now unknown person. The theory is now wholly discredited. Shakespeare is elsewhere indebted to the scholarly John Florio, and he would have been the last person living to hold him up to ridicule.

In his comment upon Warburton, Dr. Johnson says: "Whether the character of Holofernes was pointed at any particular man, I am, notwithstanding the plausibility of Dr. Warburton's conjecture, inclined to doubt. Every man adheres as long as he can to his own pre-conceptions. Before I read this note I considered the character of Holofernes as borrowed from the Rombus of Sir Philip Sidney, who, in a kind of pastoral entertainment, exhibited to Queen Elizabeth, has introduced a schoolmaster so called, speaking a leash of languages at once, and puzzling himself and his auditors with a jargon like that of Holofernes in the present play. Sidney himself might bring the character from Italy; for, as Peacham observes, the schoolmaster has long been one of the ridiculous personages in the farces of that country."

Furness notices this observation of Dr. Johnson, which is in all probability correct. Not exactly that Holofernes is borrowed from Rombus, but that both are very similarly conceived with the same purpose, in spite of Furness' disagreement. Furness says "this is disproved by the fact that The Lady of May, wherein Rombus appears, and the Quarto of Love's Labour's Lost were published in the same year, and the play was not then new." But he omits to mention the fact that Sidney's "dramatic interlude" was performed before the queen at Wanstead in 1578, which made it at once public property with such an author to give it fame. Furness quotes Rombus' first sentence, and says there is no parallel to it in Holofernes.

An illogical criticism. Some of A is not like any of B, therefore none of B is like any of A!

Shakespeare may very well have taken the hint for Holofernes from Sidney, at any rate he followed his lead in ridiculing the pedant and his ways. Sidney's "Entertainment" was printed at the end of the Arcadia, but not the first edition. It is in vol. ii. of Nichols' Progresses of Queen Elizabeth (1823). I do not think any one arising from a study of Love's Labour's Lost, and devoid of a preconception, could help being reminded forcibly of Holofernes by Rombus. Rombus not merely employs scraps and quotations, but he runs Latin words into his speeches to take place as though they were English; a very natural trick when we remember that up to about this time schoolmasters taught Latin to their scholars by talking Latin (see Ascham's Scholemaster [Arber, p. 28], ante 1568, and note at "Videsne," v. i. 30). This may have led to the trick in pedantry of stringing equivalent terms or synonyms together, very much in favour apparently with schoolmasters on the stage—a sort of dictionary-method like Florio's "Cielo: the heaven, the skie, the firmament, the welkin," adduced by Malone as a parallel to Holofernes (IV. ii. 5). We have it in Rombus immediately: "hath been quodammodo: hunted, as you would say, pursued by two, a brace, a couple, a cast of young men" (Nichols, p. 97). Holofernes is full of this sort of padding. See note at IV. ii. 62. I will select a few passages at random from Rombus: "You must divisionate your point, quasi you should cut a chees into two particles" (Nichols, p. 100; Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 77); "De singing satis. Nunc are you to argumentate of the qualifying of their estate" (Nichols, ibid.; Love's Labour's Lost, V. i. 33); "thus he saith, that the sheep are good, ergo the shepherd is good" (Nichols, p. 101; Love's Labour's Lost, v. ii. 584); “Bene, bene, nunc de questione prepositus, that is as much as to say as well, well, now of the proposed question" (Nichols, p. 102). Rombus tells us he is a "Pedagogue, one not a little versed in the disciplinating of the juvenal frie" (Nichols, p. 96), which is an earlier use of "juvenal" (Love's Labour's Lost, I. ii. 8; III. i. 60) than any in the New Eng. Dict., and used again by Flute and Falstaff

Several other

jestingly. But see my notes to this word. Shakespearian expressions are usefully illustrated from this piece of Sidney's. Again, we have here "Lalus the old Shepherd" who uses wrong words like Costard ("contempts," "egma," "ad dunghill") and Dull ("pollusion," "collusion"), with many more. See notes to "pollusion " (IV. ii. 44) and especially to "reprehend" (1.i. 182). Lalus gives us "disnounce," "bashless," "loquence," etc. (p. 96). We have another shepherd, Dorcas, who comes in as a foil to Rombus, an admirer, like Nathaniel of Holofernes, who "praises the Lord for him." Dorcas says: "O poor Dorcas, poor Dorcas! that I was not set in my young dayes to school, that I might have purchased the understanding of Master Rombus' mysterious speeches (Nichols, pp. 100, 101). See Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. (Nathaniel's third speech).

I am fairly well satisfied that Shakespeare took hints from Sidney's piece and developed them for his comic business. Of the same date (printed in 1578) as The May Lady is Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra. In III. ii. of the second part a clown says to a promoter or informer: "You sqwade knave, yle burn yee, For reforming a lye, thus against mee.” “Reform" for "inform" here is perhaps the earliest stage example of mistaking law terms.

There was a Cambridge Latin drama named Pedantius, which had the same ridicule (of pedants) for its object. It was printed in 1631. It is mentioned by Sir John Harington in his Apology for Poetry, prefixed to his Orlando Furioso (1591), as well known and popular, and it undoubtedly preceded Love's Labour's Lost. It may have afforded an inducement to do the same work in English, but it cannot have preceded Sidney's May Lady. Harington says: "Then for comedies, how full of harmless mirth is our Cambridge Pedantius and the Oxford Bellium Grammaticale." Furness quotes this from an account in the German Shakespeare Society (Thirty-fourth Yearbook), 1898, of twenty-eight Latin dramas acted at the English universities in the time of Elizabeth by George B. Churchill and Wolfgang Keller. The writers of this article say: "These considerations, together with the intimate similarity of the

two characters, drive the conviction almost home that in our Pedantius we must seek the source of Shakespeare's Holofernes." Of this statement no proof whatever is advanced beyond the "consideration" that Pedantius has a less pedantic friend (like Nathaniel) named Dromodotus (see Furness, Variorum ed. pp. 356, 357). There is however in Pedantius (Louvain edition, 1905, p. 61 and note) a parallel for the reference to cuckoldry in connection with Holofernes; if it be so, at v. i. 58, 61. Another illustration of Armado's boasted intimacy with the King occurs at III. I. in Pedantius. When he mentions the King he is amico meo. Compare "Sir, the king is... my familiar” (v. i. 88). See, too, note at IV. i. 72-75.

The writers of the account of Pedantius that Furness refers to, say the author is unknown; but that is not so, if we are to trust Thomas Nashe. Of this presently. Harington refers again to it, in The Metamorphosis of Ajax (Chiswick repr. p. 126), 1596: “For I tell you, though I will not take it upon me that I am in dialecticorum dumetis doctus, or in rhetoricorum pompapotens, or cæteris scientiis saginatus, as doth our Pedantius of Cambridge." Apparently quotations from the play, but I have not traced them in the admirable edition by Moore Smith, which has appeared since I penned this Introduction.

Nashe gives us the author's name, Master Winkfield, in Foure Letters Confuted (Grosart, ii. 244), 1593: "Though I have been pincht with want (as who is not one time or another, Pierce Penilesse), yet my muse never wept for want of maintenance as thine did in Musarum lachrimæ, that was miserably flouted at in M. Winkfield's Comedie of Pedantius in Trinitie Colledge." Smitheius vel Musarum Lachryma was Gabriel Harvey's elegy on the death of his patron, Sir Thomas Smith. This was printed in 1578, so that Pedantius must be later than that date, and therefore later than Sidney's May Lady. Further, we learn from this that Master Winkfield went in for bitter personalities, so that I think we may exclude Pedantius entirely from Shakespeare's recognition. Winkfield was, of course, Antony Winkfield, reader in Greek to Queen Elizabeth; B.A., Trinity College, Cambridge, 1574; Fellow, 1576, etc., and public orator and proctor later, 1581-89. He died about 1615. See