The third conspicuous aspect of Shakespeare's genius corresponds to what are known as the "historical plays." Only here and there do we find a critic who takes them to be the loftiest form of Shakespearean poetry, while the majority on the other hand hold them to be merely a preparatory form for other poetry, and the general view (always worthy consideration) is that they are less happy or less intense than the "great tragedies." It is also said of them that they represent the period of the "historical education," which Shakespeare undertook, with a view to acquiring a full sense of real life and the capacity for drawing personages and situations with firmness of outline. One critic has defined them as a series of "studies," studies of "heads," of "physiognomies," of "movements," taken from historical life or reality, in order to form the eye and the hand, something like the sketch-books and collections of designs of a future great painter. The defect of such critical explanations lies in continuing to conceive of the artistic process as something mechanical, and the unrecognised but understood presumption of some sort of "imitation of nature." Had Shakespeare intended to educate himself "historically," by writing the historical plays, (assuming, but not admitting, that to run through the English chronicles, and even Plutarch's lives, can be called historical education), he would have developed and formed his historical thought and become a thinker and a critic, he would not have conceived and realised the scenes and personages of the plays. Neither Shakespeare nor any other artist can ever attempt to reproduce external nature or history turned into external reality (since they do not exist in a concrete form) even in the period of first attempts and studies; all he can do is to try to produce and recognise his own sentiment and to give it form. We are thus always brought back and confined to the study of sentiment, or, as in the present case, to the sentiment which inspired what are known as the historical plays.