This insistence upon analysis and eulogy will be of special value to those who do not immediately understand of themselves, owing either to preconceptions, to habitual lack of attention, to their slight knowledge of art or to their lack of penetration. It will be of use in schools, to promote good reading, and outside them, it may assist in softening those hard heads which belong sometimes to men of letters. But it does not form part of our object in writing this treatise, nor does it appear to form part of the duty of Shakespearean criticism, for Shakespeare is one of the clearest and most evident of poets, capable of being perfectly understood by men of slight or elementary culture. We run with impatience through the many prolix, aesthetic commentaries which we already possess on his plays, as we should certainly listen with impatience to anyone who should draw our attention to the fact that the sun is shining brightly in the sky at midday, that it is gilding the country with its light, making sparkle the dew, and playing with its rays upon the leaves. On the other hand, it is not inopportune to record that excellence in his art was long denied or contested to Shakespeare. This was the general view of his contemporaries themselves, because we now know what we are to think of the words of praise, which we find relating to him in the literature of his time. These had been diligently traced and collected by scholars, but had been more or less deliberately misunderstood, and interpreted in a sense opposed to their correct meaning, which was that of benevolent sympathy and condescending praise for a poet of popular appeal, approximately what we should employ now for a lively and pleasing writer of romantic adventures. Similar judgments reappeared in a different style and at a different time in the famous utterances of Voltaire, which vary in their intonation according to his humour: such are _barbare aimable, fou séduisant, sauvage ivre,_ and the like. They do not appear to have lost their weight especially in France, where a certain Monsieur Pellissier has filled a large volume with them, coming to the conclusion that the work of Shakespeare, "malgré tant de beautés admirables est un immense fouillis," and that it generally seems to be, "celle d'un écolier, d'un écolier génial, qui n'ayant ni expérience, ni mesure, ni tact, gaspille prématuré son génie abortif." Finally (and this has greater weight), Jusserand, a learned historian of English literature, treating of Shakespeare with great display of erudition, presents him as "un fidèle serviteur" of his theatrical public, and speaks of his "défauts énormes." Chateaubriand, in his essay of 1801, playing the Voltaire in his turn, attributed to him "le génie," while he denied to him "l'art," the observance of the "règles" and "genres," which are "nés de la nature même"; but later he recognises that he was wrong to "mesurer Shakespeare avec la lunette classique." Here he put his finger on the