historical conception of life, which was possessed by Dante, though in the form of the mediaeval philosophy of history. And since historicity is both political and social ideality, Shakespeare must have been and is wanting, as has been said, in true political faith and passion. He has however been credited with this by publicists and political polemists like Gervinus, who have desired to count so great a name among their number, have imagined him possessed with the passion for it and even believed that it was crowned in him with doctrinal wisdom. It is difficult to decide by what ways and means these presuppositions were formed in his inmost soul, for with this question we reenter the biographical problem as to his education, the company he kept, his reading, his experiences; and upon all these subjects little or no exact information is available. Did he observe the fervour of life which prevailed in the England of his day with sympathetic soul and vigilant eye? Did he lend an ear to discussions upon theological and metaphysical questions and carry away from them a sense of their emptiness? Did he frequent the youth of the universities, which just at that time gave several university wits to literature and to the drama? Did he read the _Laus Stultitiae_ of Erasmus, moral and religious dialogues and treatises, the English humanists, the Platonicians, the ancient and modern historians, as he certainly read Montaigne at a later date? Did he read Machiavelli and the other political writers of Italy, and those who had begun to sketch the doctrine of the temperament and the passions, such as Huarte and Charron, did he know Bruno, or had he heard of him and of his doctrines? Or did the influence of these men and books reach him by various indirect paths, at second or third hand, through conversation, or as by a figure of speech we say, from his environment? And what part of those doubts, negations and beliefs of his, was due to his vivacity and certainty of intuition, or to his own continuous and steady rumination in himself, rather than to the course of his studies? But even if we possessed abundant notes on this subject, we should still remain without much information, because the processes of the formation of the individual escape for the most part the observation of others and frequently even the memory of him in whom they have actually occurred, and the facility with which they are forgotten proves that what is really important to preserve, is not these, but their result.