to boot, have so widely mistaken the
true point of his allusion? It is precisely because they _have_ confined
their researches to these old poets, and have _not_ followed Shakspeare to
the fountain head.

There is a passage in Quintilian which, very probably, has been the common
source of both Shakspeare's version, and that of the old poets; with this
difference, that he understood the original and they did not.

Quintilian is cautioning against the introduction of solemn bombast in
trifling affairs:

"To get up," says he, "this sort of pompous tragedy about mean matters,
is as though you would dress up children with the _mask_ and _buskins_
of Hercules."

["Nam in parvis quidem litibus has tragoedias movere tale est quale si
_personam_ Herculis et _cothurnos_ aptare infantibus velis."]

Here the addition of the _mask_ proves that the allusion is purely
theatrical. The mask and buskins are put for the stage trappings, or
_properties_, of the part of Hercules: of these, one of the items was the
_lion's skin_; and hence the extreme aptitude of the allusion, as applied
by the Bastard, in _King John_, to Austria, who was assuming the importance
of Coeur de Lion!

It is interesting to observe how nearly Theobald's plain, homely sense, led
him to the necessity of the context. The real points of the allusion can
scarcely be expressed in better words than his own:

"Faulconbridge, in his resentment, would say this to Austria, 'That
lion's skin which my great father, King Richard, once wore, looks as
uncouthly on thy back, as that other noble hide, which was borne by
Hercules, would look on the back of an ass!' A double allusion was
intended: first, to the fable of the ass in the lion's skin; then
Richard I. is finely set in competition with Alcides, as Austria is
satirically coupled with the ass."

One step farther, and Theobald would have discovered the true solution: he
only required to know that _the shoes_, by a figure of rhetoric called
synecdoche, may stand for the whole character and attributes of Hercules,
to have saved himself the trouble of conjecturing an ingenious, though
infinitely worse word, as a substitute.

As for subsequent annotators, it must be from the mental preoccupation of
this unlucky "ex pede Herculem," that _they_ have so often put their foot
in it. They have worked up Alcides' shoe into a sort of antithesis to
Cinderella's; and, like Procruste