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Shakespeare, in which the author departed from him already in the first pages, in order to solve, in his own manner, some aesthetic problem, that, in Germany, since Schlegel, Shakespeare has served as a pretext for the most bizarre reveries.

If Leo allows the works of so eminent men as Ger- vinus, Ulrici, and Kreyssig naturally to have high merit in the most different ways, in form and contents, and Furnivall writes:„The profound and generous Commentaries of Ger- vinus— an honour to a German to have written, a pleasure to an Englishman to read— is still the only book known to me that comes near the true treatment and dignity of its subject, or can be put into the hands of the student who wants to know the mind of Shakspere“; Fleay(Shakespeare Manual, p. 105) thinks:„Books about Shakespeare, called aesthetic, are best eschewed entirely, until a distinct opinion has been formed from independent study(Among the best of these are Gervinus, Ulrici, Dowden, Hazlitt)“. Storm (Englische Philologie I., Heilbronn 1881) classifies the com- mentaries of Ulrici and Gervinus as prominent works, but somewhat one-sided, Kreyssig's Lectures on Shakespeare, his time and his works as popular lectures„of little im- portance in literary point of view“(Jahrb. I, 457), whereas Dowden gives his opinion in the following manner:„Gervinus's Commentaries full and Jaborious; Kreyssig's Vorlesungen über Shakspere and his smaller Sh.-Fragen, the best German literary criticism on Shakspere. Ulrici's Shakespeare’s Dra- matische Kunst is highly esteemed in Germany, and has been translated; but Ulrici reads ideas and philosophy of his own into Shakspere“.

After having shown how little the admirers and student of our poet agree on the worth of aesthetic criticism, and in the estimation of eminent critics, I wish to add a few lines on the different interpretations and estimations which thie characters in our poet's plays themselves have undergone, in order to prove that the opinion we form about the more or less powerful characterization of the persons, or principal