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origin and developments.

There are two short, slight, conventional mentions of Aristotle's name
in Shakespeare's works. One is a very slight allusion to Aristotle's
"checks" or "moral discipline" in _The Taming of the Shrew_. That
passage is probably from a coadjutor's pen. In any case, it is merely
a playful questioning of the title of "sweet philosophy" to monopolize
a young man's education.[25]

[Footnote 25: Tranio, the attendant on the young Pisan, Lucentio, who
has come to Padua to study at the university, counsels his master to
widen the field of his studies:--

Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no Stoics, nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to _Aristotle's checks_,
As Ovid be an outcast quite adjured.

(_The Taming of the Shrew_, I., ii., 29-33.)]

The other mention of Aristotle is in _Troilus and Cressida_, and
raises points of greater interest. Hector scornfully likens his
brothers Troilus and Paris, when they urge persistence in the strife
with Greece, to "young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear
_moral_ philosophy" (II., ii., 166). The words present the meaning,
but not the language, of a sentence in Aristotle's "Nicomachean
Ethics" (i. 8). Aristotle there declares passionate youth to be
unfitted to study _political_ philosophy; he makes no mention of
_moral_ philosophy. The change of epithet does, however, no injustice
to Aristotle's argument. His context makes it plain, that by
_political_ philosophy he means the ethics of civil society, which
are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called "morals." The
maxim, in the slightly irregular shape which Shakespeare adopted,
enjoyed proverbial currency before the dramatist was born. Erasmus
introduced it in this form into his far-famed _Colloquies_. In France
and Italy the warning against instructing youth in _moral_ philosophy
was popularly accepted as an Aristotelian injunction. Sceptics about
the obvious Shakespearean tradition have made much of the circumstance
that Bacon, who cited the aphorism from Aristotle in his _Advancement
of Learning_, substituted, like Shakespeare in _Troilus and Cressida_,
the epithet "moral" for "political." The proverbial currency of the
emendation deprives the coincidence of point.

The repetition of a proverbial phrase, indirectly drawn from
Aristotle, combined with the absence of other references to the Greek
philosopher, r