The period of the great tragedies, especially, has been connected with circumstances in the private life of the author and with events in English public life. This too may or may not be true: Shakespeare may or may not have been extremely excitable, both in personal and practical matters; he may on the other hand have remained perfectly calm and watched the tossing sea from the shore, with that tone of feeling proper to artists, described by psychologists as _Scheingefühle,_ a feeling of appearance and dream. No value also is to be attributed to conjectures as to the models that Shakespeare sometimes had before him: for Shylock in the shape of some adventurer of his time, or for Prospero in the person of the Emperor Rudolph II, who was interested in science and magic, and the like, because the relation between art and its model is incommensurable. In reading the works of Shakespeare, one is sometimes inclined to think (as for that matter in the case of other poets), that some affection or incident of the life of the author is to be found in the words of this or that character, as for example in _Cymbeline,_ where Posthumus says, "Could I find out The woman's part in me! But there's no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman's part!" or in those others of _Troilus and Cressida_: "Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashions: a burning devil take them!" in the same way as some have suspected a personal memory in the case of Dante, in the Francesca episode of the reading and inebriation. But there is nothing to be done with this suspicion and the thought that suggested it. Nor is there anything to be built upon in those rare passages, where it may seem that the poet breaks the coherence and aesthetic level of his work, in order to lay stress upon some real or practical feeling of his own, by over-accentuation; because, even if we admit that there are such passages in Shakespeare, it always remains doubtful whether for him, as for other poets, the true motive for this inopportune emphasis, is to be found in the eruption of his own powerful feelings, or rather in some other accidental motive.