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rise above him up to his own ideals, but in this short cir- cuitous path, they also point to the poet who is personally full of these ideals; in Shakespeare's characters, however, we completely forget the poet himself. He, as a rule, neither gives his own experience like Goethe, nor does he pass before us as a person full of feeling and of thought, like Schiller, but makes the impression of being able to represent the life of every possible kind of foreign character as if it were his own,... he shows a power of transformation and self- abnegation, in which no Garrick can equal him“. And yet the characters whom the poet chooses with predilection, and the manner in which he depicts them, will be different in the different periods of his life; thus we feel that Shake- speare's merry comedies and mighty tragedies cannot have grown side by side. A poet's characters, therefore, may allow us a conclusion as to the period in which he created them. We can study the growth of the poet's mind, but in such a study much of the student's individuality, his mental organization and training, and thus acquired opinions and tastes, of his experience and environment comes in; his study always will be a subjective one.

The power of characterization shown in delineating the characters, especially the principal character or characters of a play is one of the evidences for assigning to it its place in the chronological order. The impression we receive of a character is a spontaneous one, but on spontaneous impressions a classification and chronology cannot be founded; we try to account for our estimation of a character by the analysis of it, and thus we enter the domain of aesthetic criticism.

Shakespeare scholars greatly differ in their appreciation of this branch of Shakespeare literature.„There are two ways by which the critic may arrive at his object“, says Ulrici,„the historical and the aesthetic. In the present day the former is generally the more popular, partly because both genaine and counterfeit thoughts are daily brought into the market in such quantities, that the price of the commo-