matters of Elizabethan history is altogether another.

In the trial of a question of fact in a court of justice, reliance is had on two sorts of evidence: first, circumstantial, or, as it may be called, narrative or historical evidence; and, second, expertthat is, "self-regarding" or "opinion" evidence. Questions of literary authorship are to be decided. in like manner by two sorts of evidence corresponding exactly to these; viz., external evidence (the date, surroundings, and circumstances under which the composition of which the authorship is sought was produced), and, second, internal evidence—that is, the manner and style and text of the composition itself. Now, this internal evidence is itself of two sorts: first, comparative criticism, and, second, textual criticism. The first, as its name implies, is to be conducted by simple comparison, the problem being simply, given a literary work known to be by a certain author, to discover if another work is also by that same author. But this class of evidence is not absolutely reliable. To quote the words of the late accomplished Mr. James Spedding: "In passing upon questions of authorship by means of internal evidence the critic must always be allowed to judge for himself"; that is to say, it is found to be absolutely impossible to remove from the criticism of any one man that personal equation, or "point of view," which arises imperatively from the education, temperament and tendencies of the comparative critic himself. A notable instance of the failure of comparative criticism was in the Ireland Shakespeareforgery cases, where a whole city full of pundits

and critics hesitated as to whether the work of a mere lad was to be accepted as Shakespeare until outside circumstantial evidences came to their aid, and the young forger of the style of the world's greatest poet was surprised in the act of forgery and confessed to the whole. Another well-known case was that of Mr. Collier's alleged discoveries, in 1852, of corrections in the Shakespeare text. No amount of comparative critical acumen (and every Shakespearean critic in England and America worked at them) was able to decide absolutely and finally as to their genuineness. But by and by it occurred to the authorities of the British Museum to go to work with microscope and acids, when they speedily exposed the emendations as of very recent manufacture indeed, scarcely antedating their production by Mr. Collier himself. Thus it appears that, unassisted,- especially at remote dates from the fact, the chances are very largely against an arrival at the exact truth by unaided comparative criticism. To recur to an example very recently suggested: supposing, in the twenty-second century, a body of comparative critics should be given the official report of the Berlin Conference and the speeches of Lord Beaconsfield, whose tactics in that great parley were singly and alone able to confront an empire in the flush of victory, and to force it to relinquish a prize it had been struggling to possess for centuries, which it had just won by sword and battle; supposing this same body of critics were then presented with a copy of "Lothair," and asked, from internal, comparative evidence only (they having no records of the nineteenth century and no life of Beaconsfield before

them), to say definitely whether the same individual who defied and dominated Russia by his statesmanship also wrote the novel can we doubt what the verdict of these comparative critics would be? Textual criticism, on the other hand, is capaable of being made reliable, but only negatively. It can demonstrate, for example, from the employment of words that were uninvented or unused before certain dates, the age and period earlier than which certain compositions could not have been written, and thus exclude all authors earlier than that age or period. But to pronounce positively as to who was as well as to who could not have been the particular, identical author, it is quite as powerless as any other sort of critical evidence. Hence it follows that since even documentary, historical and circumstantial evidence is fallible- no one single class of testimony ought to be relied upon; and that in literary questions, exactly as in those submitted for judicial determination, all sorts, classes and kinds of evidence must cumulatively be availed of in order to set out with any hope or chance of reaching the exact truth.

Putting aside any question as to the authorship of the Elizabethan English works so universally credited to William Shakespeare; leaving Baconians, editorialists and pro-Shakespeareans to submit propositions, make postulates and riddle each other's theories and corollaries to their hearts' content by means of all the evidence, historical, circumstantial, textual and comparative: it is proposed in this paper to examine a new candidate for favor which the present century (and the

last quarter of it) has developed. This new testimony is called Esthetic Criticism. I do not mean that the invention is of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was known before. But earlier it was called merely eulogium, encomium or, perhaps, panegyric. So far as can be discovered, it is only very recently indeed that it has claimed to be actual evidence — actual and undebatable proof as to the actual man Shakespeare, his moods and tenses, his fortunes, follies, hopes and fears.

To begin with, these marvelous works are like a bank of clouds in a brightening sky. Every beholder will for himself happen to see some semblance somewhere in their profile which he may describe in words, but which - since he has no bearing by which to indicate it - he cannot hope to point out to his fellow-gazers. So in the Shakespeare works one will be attracted by a figment of the poet as a whole, another by a detail thereof. As, for example, one will be moved over the picture of dishonored Lucrece sitting lonesome, with full heart, awaiting her husband's return and the moment when her own suicide will be appropriate, while another will wonder at the knowledge of human nature which makes her, in the very depth of her misery, discover herself admiring a picture on the wall. One will see in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" only a beautiful romance, while his co-reader will find in it the touches of a hand used to theatrical business, in that he allows the clowns to play their interlude only until the fun is exhausted, when he makes them omit their epilogue and substitute a dance instead. And so

on. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than that each one should, in dealing with the works, write of that which Shakespeare is to him. But when the writer goes further, and insists that the William Shakespeare whose name is associated with these plays was the embodiment of that which he himself finds in the works, and that the whole world shall so consent to understand Shakespeare, in other words, proposes to write the biography of the dramatist out of his own inner reading of the text of the dramas before him,this matter of esthetic criticism becomes not only incontinent and inconsistent, but leads at once into all sorts of irregularities and absurdities.

The modern and present exponents of this esthetic criticism, used as a method of writing an author's history from the text of his alleged works, are principally the members of the New Shakespeare Society of London. It would never, of course, have occurred to these gentlemen to write. the life of the late Mr. Robertson out of the pages of his comedies "Caste," "School," "Ours" or "Play," or the life of Mr. Boucicault out of "London Assurance," "Arrah-na-Pogue," "The Shaughraun" or "Formosa"; but, all the same, they have given us a beautiful history of William Shakespeare out of his plays alone. Without undertaking to follow the voluminous papers of the New Shakespeare Society, a brief notice of the labors of certain of its school will sufficiently illustrate its methods.

"It is Stratford," cries Mr. Furnivall, "which has given Shakespeare the picture of the sweet country school-girls working at one flower, warb