Among these must be included (not in the seat of criticism, but in the entrance-hall and at the gates) what may be called _exclamatory_ criticism, which instead of understanding a poet in his particularity, his finite-infinity, drowns him beneath a flood of superlatives. This is the method employed by English writers towards Shakespeare (I am bound to admit that the Italians do the same as regards Dante). An example of this habit, selected from innumerable others, is Swinburne's book, from which we learn that "it would be better that the world should lose all the books it contains rather than the plays of Shakespeare"; that Shakespeare is "the supreme creator of men"; that he "stands alone," and at the most might admit "Homer on his right and Dante on his left hand"; then, as to individual plays, we learn that the trilogy of _Henry IV-V_ suffices to reveal him as "the greatest playwright of the world," that the _Dream_ stands "without and above any possible or imaginable criticism." Thus he continues, puffing out his cheeks to find hyperboles, which themselves finally turn out to be inferior to hyperbolic requirements. Sometimes such exclamations not only border on the ridiculous, but fall right into it, as is the case with Carlyle, who stood in perplexity before the hypothetical dilemma, as to whether England could better afford to lose "the empire of India or Shakespeare." Victor Hugo, more generous, and an admirer of the ocean, constituted a series of _hommes océans,_ where the tragic poet of Albion found a place alongside of Aeschylus, Dante, Michael-Angelo, Isaiah and Juvenal. Another style of criticism, _by images_ to be found in works that are estimable in other respects, is somewhat akin to this criticism without criticism, besides being far more justifiable, because, if it does not explain, it tries at least to give, as though in a poetical translation, a synthetic impression of Shakespeare's art and of the physiognomy of his various works. It describes the works of Shakespeare by means of landscapes and other pictures, as Herder and other writers of the _Sturm and Drang_ period delighted in doing. Coleridge too did likewise and Hazlitt even more often, as may be shown by an extract from the letter of a certain Miss Florence O'Brien, on _King Lear,_ to be found in well-nigh all books that deal with this tragedy. She begins: "This play is like a tempestuous night: the first scene is like a wild sunset, grandiose and terrible, with gusts of wind and rumblings of thunder, which announce the imminence of the hurricane: then comes a furious tempest of madness and folly, through which we see darkly the monstrous and unnatural figures of Goneril and Regan"; et cetera. The danger of such poetical variations is that of superimposing one art on another, and of leading astray or of distracting the attention from the genuine features of the original to be enjoyed and understood, in the attempt to render its effect.