If this be so: if the total value and significance of the great poet is thus a changing function and goes on evolving through the generations out of the matrix of an unchanging text, then there is no poet to whom the observation can be more relevant than it must be to Burns. Manifestly, there are poets in whom the sheerly intellectual content to be exploited is greater and more various, and who, therefore, should have a longer course to run before they are overtaken by the uninspired mind in its pursuit of wisdom. Yet though their course be long, the track may, in a sense, be narrow. Their lives and works may present a simple issue, and lie within the placid marches of letters with a certain aloofness, a certain abstractness and destitution. Here, as so often, Shakespeare is the supreme example. His riches are infinite even in a numerical sense, and their appraisement may well be endless. Yet in their totality they are an uncomplicated fact of literature. There is nothing implicated in them of the scene and circumstances of their production; of the humanity of an historical man; of the tragedy of a life. Of the life of Shakespeare, indeed, nobody knows anything save his biographers, who have elaborated or created it for themselves by discussing in great detail and with exhaustive knowledge the prevailing absence of information on the subject. Therefore an estimate or interpretation of this Poet, which took cognizance of nothing outside of his works—which treated them as though they had been found in a dream, and barely assumed the historic fact of Christendom—would not at once appear to be leaving untouched any topic of pressing relevance, and might easily set the limits of our knowledge, our understanding of them and him, a little farther on.