his own sentiment and of his motives of inspiration. In one case only is it possible to separate form from content and to consider it in itself; that is to say, when the rhetorical method is applied to Shakespeare or to any other artist. This consists in separating form from content and making of it a garment, which becomes just nothing at all without the body with which it grew up, or gives rise to pure caprice and to the illusion that anyone can appropriate and adopt it to his own purposes. In romantic parlance (for there existed a romantic manner of speech) what was known as a mixture of comic and tragic, of prose and verse, what was called the "humorous, the grotesque, the fanciful," such as apparitions of mysterious and supernatural beings, and again the method that Shakespeare employed in production of his plays, his manner of treating the conflict and determining the catastrophe, the way in which he makes his personages speak, the quality and richness of his vocabulary, were enumerated as "characteristics of his art," things that others could employ if they wished to do so, and indeed they were so employed, with the poor results that one can imagine. This is the source of the anticritical terminology employed for Shakespeare and other poets, which discovers and magnifies his "ability," his "expedients," his "conveying of the necessary information without having the air of doing so," as though he were a calculator or constructor of instruments with certain practical ends, not a divine imagination. But enough of this.