Excerpt from Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity: Greek and Latin Antiquity as Presented in Shakespeare's Plays (Crowned by the French Academy) For those readers who only care for discussion of some Obscure passage or Obsolete word, there will, I fear, be nothing but disappointment in store; the aim of the book is of a purely literary character, and it Offers no information Of an etymological or philological nature. But though this may render it valueless to one class of readers, it enables it, I trust, to appeal the more surely to those by whom literature - in contradistinction to science, history, and to all books written entirely for the sake of imparting information, without the devotion Of any special care to the manner in which the informa tion is given - is prized as one Of the most precious forms of art. It is no easy task to translate a book in which so great a part is played by the style Of the author, the charm of which, with all its lightness, point, and grace, it must be vain to hope to render in a translation. I have endeavoured, as far as might be, to convey some slight notion of it, and although the echoes of the original sound can, at best, be only few and faint, I hope the impression may somehow make itself felt that the book in its original form aims at being a work of art. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.