Let us pass over _biographical-aesthetic_ criticism: its fundamental error and the arbitrary judgments with which it disturbs both biography and the criticism of art have already been sufficiently illustrated; and let us also pass over the _aesthetic_ criticism of _philologists,_ who imagine themselves to be interpreting and judging poetry, when they are talking mere philology and uttering ineptitudes prepared with infinite pains. Being confined to citing but one example of their method, I would select for that purpose Furnivall's introduction to the _Leopold Shakespeare._ I fail to understand why this introduction is so highly esteemed and reverenced. Furnivall too, when he contrives not to lose himself in exclamations and attempts poetry, ("who could praise Falstaff sufficiently?" "who could fail to love Percy?" "the countess mother in _All's Well_ resembles one of Titian's old ladies;" etc.), amuses himself by establishing links between the plays. These he discovers in the situations, in the action and elsewhere, regarding the works externally and from a general point of view. Thus he discovers a connection between _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet,_ in the repetition of the name of "Caesar," which is found thrice in the latter play, in the mouth of Horatio, of Polonius and of Hamlet, on the occasion of both seeing a ghost, in Hamlet's feeling that he must avenge his father like Antonius Caesar, and in the likeness of character between Brutus and Hamlet's father. Thus he attains to the ridiculous, as Carlyle and Swinburne by another route, when, for instance, he affirms that "in a certain sense Hotspur (the fiery Hotspur of _Henry IV_) is Kate (that is to say, the shrew in the _Taming of the Shrew,_) become a man and bearing armour!"