ng" at Cambridge with Richard
Farmer.(18)

The _Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare_ is not an independent treatise
like Whalley's _Enquiry_, but rather a detailed reply to the arguments of
Upton and his fellows. Farmer had once been idle enough, he tells us
himself, to collect parallel passages, but he had been saved by his
remarkable bibliographical knowledge. He found out that the literature of
the age of Elizabeth was a better hunting ground than the classics for
Shakespearian commentators. Again and again he shows that passages which
had been urged as convincing proof of knowledge of Latin or Greek are
either borrowed from contemporary translations or illustrated by
contemporary usage. In so far as the _Essay_ aims at showing the futility
of the arguments advanced to prove Shakespeare's learning, it is
convincing. The only criticism that can reasonably be passed on it is that
Farmer is apt to think he has proved his own case when he has merely
destroyed the evidence of his opponents. His conclusion regarding
Shakespeare's knowledge of French and Italian may be too extreme to be
generally accepted now, and indeed it may not be logically deducible from
his examination of the arguments of other critics; but on the whole the
book is a remarkably able study. Though Farmer speaks expressly of
acquitting "our great poet of all piratical depredations on the Ancients,"
his purpose has often been misunderstood, or at least misrepresented. He
aimed at giving Shakespeare the greater commendation, but certain critics
of the earlier half of the nineteenth century would have it that he had
tried to prove, for his own glory, that Shakespeare was a very ignorant
fellow. William Maginn in particular proclaimed the _Essay_ a "piece of
pedantic impertinence not paralleled in literature." The early Variorum
editions had acknowledged its value by reprinting it in its entirety,
besides quoting from it liberally in the notes to the separate plays, and
Maginn determined to do his best to rid them in future of this
"superfluous swelling." So he indulged in a critical Donnybrook; but after
hitting out and about at the _Essay_ for three months he left it much as
he found it.(19) He could not get to close quarters with Farmer's
scholarship. His bluster compares ill with Farmer's gentler manner, and in
some passages the quiet humour has proved too subtle for his animosity.
There was more impartiality in the judgment of Johnson: "Dr. Farmer, you