direction to the summit.  The knowledge that we have thus gained, however late to profit by it ourselves, should at least be valuable to others.  But, unfortunately, as Balzac has said, experience is an article that no one will use at second hand.  When the great teachers of the world, who have been its most patient scholars, shall go to work to teach us how to study, and when we are content to learn, then we shall all be in a fair way to become sages.

But, in the mean time, there are two things we must apprehend—­truisms both of them, but, like all truisms, better known theoretically than practically.  The first is, that we must not use a microscope if we want to study the stars; and the second is, that we must beware of having a fly between the lenses of our telescope, unless we wish to discover a monster in the moon.  If a discriminating public would not consider it an insult, one might add, in the third place, that it is useless to look for lunar rainbows in the daytime.

It is true that all this sounds like child’s play, but it is astonishing how many of our Shakespearian critics commit one or all of these faults.  Forgetting entirely that criticism demands common sense, impartial judgment, intense sympathy, a total absence of prejudice, and a great deal of general information, they bring to their task minds deeply tinctured with preconceived systems of truth, goodness and beauty, upon whose Procrustean bed the unfortunate poet must be stretched; while, as if ignorant of the history of thought, they judge the productions of another age and another atmosphere by the canons of criticism that hold good to-day among ourselves.  Not only this, but they snuff enigmas in every line, and scent abstruse theories behind the simplest statement.  They take up passages of Shakespeare whose obvious meaning any person of average intelligence can understand, and turn and twist them into such intricate doublings that they cannot undo their own puzzle.  They attack his poetry as if it were a second Rosetta Stone, or as if it had to be read, like the lines in a Hebrew book, backward.  They study him in the spirit of the fool, who, being given a book upside down, stood on his head to read it—­a position naturally confusing to the intellect.

Nor is it only in their methods of investigation that many of our Shakespearian critics are at fault.  Their fondness for rearing vast temples of possibilities upon small corner-stones of fact is proverbial.  We know that Shakespeare went to London, where he both wrote and acted plays, and upon this slender basis you may find, in almost any of his commentators, such added items of biography as this sentence from Heraud’s book upon Shakespeare’s Inner Life: “That he had a house in Southwark, that his brother Edmund lived with him, and that his wife was his frequent companion in London, are all exceedingly probable suppositions.”  So they may be to Mr. Heraud’s mind, but the next biographer shall form a totally