It
was familiar in Florio's Second Frutes (1591), and First Frutes
(1578), with the English translation. The books were as accessible
to Shakspere as to Bacon. Either author might also draw from James
Sandford's Garden of Pleasure, done out of the Italian in 1573-6.
Where the scholastic habits of Bacon at Cambridge are to be
discovered in this play, I know not, unless it be in Biron's witty
speech against study. If the wit implies in the author a Cambridge
education, Costard and Dull and Holofernes imply familiarity with
rustics and country schoolmasters. Where the author proves that he
"could not have been more familiar with French politics if, like
Bacon, he had spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to
France," I cannot conjecture. THERE ARE NO FRENCH POLITICS IN THE
PIECE, any more than there are "mysteries of fashionable life," such
as Bacon might have heard of from Essex and Southampton. There is no
"familiarity with all the gossip of the Court"; there is no greater
knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got from common English
books. There is abundance, indeed overabundance of ridicule of
affected styles, and quips, with which the literature of the day was
crammed: call it Gongorism, Euphuism, or what you please. One does
not understand how or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age) made all
these discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr.
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