We may also save ourselves from wonder and invective of the "Baconian hypothesis," by means of this indifference of the poetical work towards biography. This hypothesis maintains that the real author of the plays, which pass under the name of Shakespeare, was Francis Bacon. We are likewise preserved from those others of more recent date and vogue, which maintain that the author was Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, or that Rutland collaborated with Southampton, or that there really existed a society of dramatic authors, (Chettle, Heywood, Webster, etc.) with the final revision entrusted to Bacon, or finally (the latest discovery of the sort) that he was William Stanley, sixth Earl >of Derby. A thousand or more volumes, opuscules and articles have been printed to deal with these conjectures, and although--to the severe eye of the trained philologist--they may justly seem to be extravagant, yet they retain the merit of being a sort of involuntarily _ironic treatment_ of the purely philological method and of its abuse of conjecture. But even if we grant the unlikely contention that in the not very great brain of the philosopher Bacon, there lodged the brain of a very great poet, from which proceeded the Shakespearean drama, nothing would thereby have been discovered or proved, save a singular marvel, a joke, a monstrosity of nature. The artistic problem would remain untouched, because that drama remains always the same; Lear laments and imprecates in the same manner, Othello struggles furiously, Hamlet meditates and wavers before the problem of humanity and the action that he is called upon to take, and in the same manner, all are enwrapped in the veil of Eternity, It is a good thing to shake off this weight of erroneous philology (another philology exists alongside of it, which is not erroneous, since it preserves the probably genuine text, and interprets the vocabulary and the historical references with a genuine feeling for art), not only because, whether or no it attain the end of biography, it distracts attention from the right and proper object of artistic criticism, but also because it employs the biography, true or false, for the purpose of clouding and changing the artistic vision. Confounding art and document, it transports into art whatever it has discovered or believes itself to have discovered by means of research, turning the serene compositions of the poet into a series of shudders, cries, restless motions, convulsions, ferocious springs, manifestations, now of sentimental rapture, now of furious desire.