As the result of our argument, we cannot pass from the ideal to the extrinsic or chronological order, and therefore it could only indicate caprice, were we to conclude from the fact that _Titus Andronicus_ represents a literary Shakespeare or a theatrical imitator, that it must chronologically precede _Romeo and Juliet,_ or even _Love's Labour's Lost._ The same applies to the argument that because _Cymbeline,_ the _Winter's Tale_ and _Pericles_ are composed of romantic material similar to that of _All's Well,_ of _Much Ado_ and of _Twelfth Night_ (where we find innocent maidens falsely accused and afterwards triumphant, dead women, who turn out to be alive, women dressed as men, and the like), that they must all have been written at the same time. The same holds good of the historical plays: we cannot argue from the fact that these plays represent a more complex condition of the soul than the love comedies and the romantic plays, that the historical plays are all of them to be dated later than the two groups above-mentioned; or that for the same reasons, _Hamlet,_ the first _Hamlet,_ could not by any means have been composed by Shakespeare in his very earliest period, about 1592, as Swinburne asserts, swears and takes his solemn oath is the case: and who knows but he is right? In like manner, we cannot pass from the chronological to the ideal order, and since the chronology, documentary or conjectural, places _Coriolanus_ after _Hamlet,_ and also after _Othello, Macbeth, Lear_ and _Anthony and Cleopatra,_ must not, therefore, insist upon finding in it profound thoughts, which it does not contain, or deny that it belongs to the period of the "historical plays" with which it has the closest connection. Again, although the chronology places _Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale,_ as has been said, in the last years of Shakespeare's life, we must not insist upon finding profound meanings in those works, or talk, as some have done, of a superior ethic, a "theological ethic," to which Shakespeare is supposed at last to have attained, or dwell upon the gracious idyllic scenes to be found in them, weighing them down with non-existent mysteries, making out that the Imogens and Hermiones are beings of equal or greater poetic intensity than Cordelia, or Desdemona, or take Leontes for Othello, Jacques for Iago, whereas, in the eyes of those possessed of poetic sentiment, the former stand to the latter in the relation of little decorative studies compared to works by Raphael or Giorgione. Proof of this is to be found in the fact that the latter have become popular and live in the hearts and minds of all, while the former please us, we admire them, and pass on.