We do not however wish to assert that these two series of different questions are without relation: even different things have some relation to one another, which resides in their diversity itself and is connected above them. The critic and historian of art would certainly find it advantageous for the studies that he was about to undertake, to know the chronology, the circumstances, the details, the compositions, the recompositions, the recastings and the collaborations of the Shakespearean drama. He would thus avoid the obligation of vexing his mind as to certain interpretations, and of remaining more or less perplexed for a greater or lesser space of time, before certain peculiarities, discordances and inequalities, doubtful, that is to say, as to whether they be errors in art, or art forms of which it is difficult to seize the hidden connection. But he would gain nothing more from this advantage (with the conjoined admonition, to beware of the prejudices that such information is apt to cause). His judgment would of necessity be founded, in final analysis, upon intrinsic reasons of an artistic nature, arising from an examination of the works before him. The chronology that he will succeed in fixing, will not be a real or material chronology, but an ideal and an aesthetic one, for these are two forms of chronology which only coincide approximately and sometimes altogether diverge from one another. Were the authenticity of the works all clearly settled, the critic would be preserved from proclaiming that certain works or parts of works are Shakespeare's, when they are really, say, Greene's or Marlowe's, which is an inexactitude of nomenclature, as also is the treating of Shakespeare's work as being by someone else or anonymous. But this onomastic inexactitude is already corrected by the presumption that the critic has his eye fixed, not on the biographical and practical personage of Shakespeare, but on the poetical personage. He is thus able to face with calmness the danger, which is not a danger and is extremely improbable, of allowing to pass under the colours of Shakespeare a work drawn from the same or a similar source of inspiration, which stands at an equal altitude with others, or of adding another work to those of inferior quality and declining value assigned to the same name, because he is differentiating aesthetic values and not title-deeds to legal property.