It is true that all this sounds like child's play, but it is astonishing how many of our Shakespearian critics commit one or all of these faults. Forgetting entirely that criticism demands common sense, impartial judgment, intense sympathy, a total absence of prejudice, and a great deal of general information, they bring to their task minds deeply tinctured with preconceived systems of truth, goodness and beauty, upon whose Procrustean bed the unfortunate poet must be stretched; while, as if ignorant of the history of thought, they judge the productions of another age and another atmosphere by the canons of criticism that hold good to-day among ourselves. Not only this, but they snuff enigmas in every line, and scent abstruse theories behind the simplest statement. They take up passages of Shakespeare whose obvious meaning any person of average intelligence can understand, and turn and twist them into such intricate doublings that they cannot undo their own puzzle. They attack his poetry as if it were a second Rosetta Stone, or as if it had to be read, like the lines in a Hebrew book, backward. They study him in the spirit of the fool, who, being given a book upside down, stood on his head to read it--a position naturally confusing to the intellect. Nor is it only in their methods of investigation that many of our Shakespearian critics are at fault. Their fondness for rearing vast temples of possibilities upon small corner-stones of fact is proverbial. We know that Shakespeare went to London, where he both wrote and acted plays, and upon this slender basis you may find, in almost any of his commentators, such added items of biography as this sentence from Heraud's book upon Shakespeare's _Inner Life:_ "That he had a house in Southwark, that his brother Edmund lived with him, and that his wife was his frequent companion in London, are all exceedingly probable suppositions." So they may be to Mr. Heraud's mind, but the next biographer shall form a totally different set of "exceedingly probable suppositions" equally satisfactory to himself. The same critic says that when Shakespeare, in his Sonnets, spoke of "a black beauty" (a phrase universally used to express a brunette as late even as the age of Queen Anne), the poet had his Bible open at Solomon's Song, and meant the Bride "who is black but comely;" in other words, the Reformed Church. Mr. Page, the artist, finds in the Chandos portrait, after it has been cleaned and scraped, and upon the photographs of the German mask, a certain mark which he thinks the indication of a scar. Two gentlemen, one an artist, who have seen the mask itself, assure him that they find his scar to be merely a slight abrasion or discoloration of the plaster; but Mr. Page, secure in his position, quotes Sonnet 112, Your love and pity doth the impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow, and triumphantly asks, "If that doesn't refer to the scar, what does it refer to?"