Shakespeare, as far as possible without hypotheses and fancies, have been obliged to retail a series of general assertions, in which all individualisation is lost, even if Shakespeare be pronounced good, honest, gentle, serviceable, prudent, laborious, frank, gay, and the like. But the majority convert the less probable conjectures into certainties, and proceed from conjecture to conjecture and from assertion to assertion, finally producing, under the title, _Life of Shakespeare,_ nothing but a romance, which, however, always turns out to be too colourless to be called artistic. A rapacious hand is stretched out to seize the poetical works themselves, with the view of writing this sort of fiction since (to quote the author of one of these unamusing fictions, Brandes) it cannot be admitted that it is impossible to know by deducing them from his writings, the life, the adventures, and the person of a man who has left about forty plays and poems. And it is certainly possible to deduce all these things from the poetical writings, but the life, and the poetical adventures and personages, not the practical and biographical; save in the case (which is not that of Shakespeare,) where definitely informative, autobiographical statements and excursions are to be found among the poems, that is to say, passages that are not poetical, but prosaic. In every other instance, the poetical emotion does not lead to the practical, because the relation between the two is not _deterministic,_ from effect to cause, but _creative,_ from material to form, and therefore incommensurable. The moment it is raised to the sphere of poetry, a sentiment that has really been experienced is plucked from its practical and realistic soil, and made the motive of composition for a world of dreams, one of the infinite possible worlds, in which it is as useless to seek any longer the reality of that sentiment, as it is vain to seek a drop of water poured into the ocean, and transformed from what it was previously by ocean's vast embrace. One feels almost inclined to repeat as warning that strophe from the _Sonnets,_ where the poet said of his mistress to his friend: "Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe."