No traveller returns,”
necessarily had in his mind the
“Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
Illuc unde negant redire quemquam,”
of Catullus; although the latter lines were quoted by Seneca the philosopher, and were as familiar as household words among the verse-loving ancients. Dr. Johnson’s remark on the similarity between Caliban’s desire to sleep again, and the πάλιν ἤθελον καθεύδειν of Anacreon, may apply to nearly all the passages in our national poet which appear to have been derived from the ancients. If we judged them by any other rule than that the ideas presented themselves naturally to Shakspeare’s mind, without consideration whether any one before him had sung to the self-same tune, we might soon turn his, and indeed any poet’s works, into a thing of shreds and patches. For instance, again, when the young Dane describes Osric as “spacious in the possession of dirt,” we might accuse the author, yet wrongfully, perhaps, of having stolen the idea from the “multa dives tellure” of Horace. We might imagine that the “Id in summa fortuna æquius quod validius,” of Tacitus, gave birth to
“That in the captain’s but a choleric word,
Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy,”
of Shakspeare, who would have been very much surprised had he been told as much. Again, Corneille, because he said,
“Qui commence bien ne fait rien s’il n’achève,”
is not to be accused of having written a pendant to the assertion of Flaccus—