fundamental mistake of that sort of criticism, which judges art, not by its intrinsic qualities, but by comparison with other works of art, which are taken as models. The same mistake was renewed, when French tragedy was not the model, but the art of realistic modern drama and fiction. The principal document in support of this is Tolstoi's book, where at every word or gesture of Shakespeare's characters, he exclaims that men do not speak thus, that is to say, the men who are not man in universal, but the men of Tolstoi's romances, though these latter happen to be far nearer to the characters of Shakespeare than their great, but unreasonable and quite uncritical author suspected. Tolstoi arrives at the point of preferring the popular and unpoetical play _King Lear,_ to the _King Lear_ of Shakespeare, because there is more logic in the conduct of the plot in the former, thus showing that he prefers minute prosaic details to sublime poetry. An attenuated form of these views as to the lack of art in Shakespeare is the theory maintained better by Rümelin than by others, to the effect that the characters in Shakespeare are worth a great deal more than the action or plots, which are disconnected, intermittent, contradictory and without any feeling for verisimilitude. He also holds that Shakespeare works on each scene, without having the power of visualising the preceding scene, or the one that is to follow, and also that the characters themselves do not respect the truth of dialogue and of the drama, in their manner of speech, which is always fiery, imaginative and splendid. Finally, it might be said of him that he composes beautiful music for libretti, which are more or less ill constructed. Now if this theory had for its object to assert, though with emphasis and exaggeration, that in a poetical work the material part of the story, the web of events, does not count, and that the only thing of importance is the soul that circulates within it, just as in a picture, it is not the material side of the things painted (which is called by critics of painting "the literary element," or that which taken in itself is external and without importance), but the rhythm of the lines and of the colours, what he maintained would be correct, if only as a reaction. Coleridge has already noted the independence of the dramatic interest from the intrigue and quality of the story, which in the Shakespearean drama, was obtained from the best known and commonest sources. But the object with which this theory was conceived by Rümelin and with which it is generally maintained, has for its object to establish a dualism or contradiction in the art of Shakespeare, by proving him to be "strong" in one domain of the spirit and "weak" in another, where strength in both is "necessary," in order to produce a perfect work.