Shakespeare) is right," he says, "it follows that what some people profanely call aberrations are, in reality, evidence of the existence of subtle and hitherto unrecognised laws. Be mine the task of formulating these laws, classifying the effects intended (and, of course, produced), fitting every scene, character, and incident into its place in an elaborate pattern constructed expressly so that they may dovetail into it, and, in short, proving inductively that the world of Shakespeare's art is the best of all possible worlds"-the very proposition, I need scarcely say, from which he started on this circular tour. Mr. Moulton, in brief, takes to pieces five of Shakespeare's plays, counts the pieces and makes a learnedly-named pigeon-hole for each; and then, having popped them all safely away, turns in triumph to his fellow critics, saying, "If you can't make all Shakespeare fit in, it must clearly be the fault of your 'judicial' system; see how my inductive plan provides a place for everything and puts everything in its place!" In the course of this analysis and docketing, Mr. Moulton, who is both painstaking and ingenious, chances on many curious and valuable observations. Some of his pigeonholes (he calls them "Topics in Dramatic Science") are handy and wellnamed, while others are cumbrously pedantic. His criticism may even be called scientific in the sense in which we apply the term to good boxing and good billiard-playing-that is to say, it is neat, workmanlike, and full of knowledge. But the fact remains that it works in a vicious circle, presupposing faultlessness in order to prove perfection.

Mr. Moulton is not the first commentator, nor the fiftieth, who has constructed an aesthetic theory specially to fit every detail of Shakespeare's practice, and then called upon the world to take note how scrupulously Shakespeare obeys its dictates. Had he applied it to Shakespeare alone, one would not wonder that the fallacy of

his method should have escaped his notice. But he must needs go further. In a luckless moment slighted Logic took its revenge (a Nemesis quite after Mr. Moulton's own heart) by suggesting to him the question, "Why should Shakespeare, any more than Brown, Jones, and Robinson, be a law unto himself? The injustice of this distinction was obvious, and Mr. Moulton's way out of the difficulty was not to bring Shakespeare down to the level of mere fallible mortals, but to extend to all other writers his privilege of infallibility. It is astounding that a thinker so acute as Mr. Moulton should not have recognised his error as soon as he tried to imagine the application of his methods even to such a writer as Ben Jonson (the instance he himself chooses), not to mention the smaller fry of literature. In dealing with Shakespeare he was really on the heights. The very fact of supreme merit being presupposed lent some speciousness to the fiction that "merit, absolute and relative," was disregarded. Where all is, by hypothesis, perfect, praise is impertinent and blame impossible; as Mr. Moulton puts it, there can be no differences of degree, but solely differences of kind. If any writer, in short, can with a semblance of reason be made a law unto himself, that writer is Shakespeare. But what purpose is served by pretending that Ben Jonson is a self-luminous body, an autonomous state in the world of letters, one of those existences

"Qui out

Leur raison en eux-même, et sont parcequ'ils sont?"

The pretence, as we have seen, broke down entirely even in the case of Shakespeare; in the case of Jonson it could not maintain itself for an instant. What may be temporarily

obscured with reference to Shakespeare is glaringly obvious with reference to Jonson, namely, that no one is in the least degree concerned about anything but his merits and

faults, and that an æsthetic system built upon his writings alone, as though they were the whole literature of the universe, would be like the sunbeams drawn from cucumbers, impossible, and, if possible, futile. And if this is clear with regard to Jonson, how much more SO with regard to Kyd, Cartwright, Davenant, Wycherley, Cibber, Colman, Moncrieff, Buckstone, and T. W. Robertson, all of whom (not to go beyond the playwrights) are in the eyes of Mr. Moulton's impartial science quite as worthy of "investigation" as Jon

My day of rest had come at last. I had finished looking over my last paper; I had sent in my list of marks to the Head-Master; I had written my report to the Governing Body. I had, in deference to my homœopathic adviser, taken two globules of mercurius, for the sake of my liver which had suffered from the hard work. But it was not to be expected that the mental strain could be at once relaxed, or that the succeeding calm would lay to immediate rest the tossing undulations of the agitated brain. Fragments of wrecks of Grammar and Syntax, distorted Paradigms and dislocated Sequences, danced upon the ruffled surface. Homer and Sophocles, Thucydides and Virgil, Cicero and Herodotus, rose and sank and rose again, clamorously grappling with disagreeing commentators and rival emendations. All the anomalies of dialect, metre, and construction; all the crabbed and corrupt passages which I had severed from their context, and not without pride propounded as enigmas and laid as traps for my unwary and puzzled victims, were blended together in an inextricable maze of bewildering entanglement. All that had been distinct and definite, ranged and classified in orderly succession and compact groups, was now jumbled together in hideous confusion; articles, particles, tenses, moods, prepositions, quantities, accents; clauses, subordinate, relative, temporal, conditional, direct, indirect; genders, concords, Greek and Latin together; poetry and prose, orator, historian, dramatist; a chaos of philology, a literary Babel. And over all were scattered marks, averages, and percentages, a cloud of meaningless numbers and figures; while through the wreaths of smoke that curled upward from the bowl of my pipe, the faces of those whom I had tortured

in viva voce, some mutely appealing, others guessing defiantly-fat faces, thin faces, white faces, red faces, seemed to mock and scowl at me.

As soon as I could think, I began to wonder what was the good of it all. The memory of the days when I had myself been examined came back to me, and I began to look at myself from the point of view of the Examinee. Had I profited by being periodically uprooted to see how I was growing, and replanted to be fed with perhaps some different kind of dressing, or with larger doses of the same, that I might win some prize for my cultivator at the next Exhibition? I had hated it, resented it, then; and now here was I pulling up these poor plants from their forcing-bed and reporting upon their progress. Did the great cause of mental culture profit by all this? Was the true love of learning fostered, or any fresh impulse given thereby to disinterested literary study? What gratification was it to me as a scholar and a critic of scholarship to have depreciated the labour of the teacher by abusing the taught to have stigmatised Smith's translation as "bald," to have lamented Thomson's want of style, to have damned Jones with faint praise, even to have detected great promise in Robinson minor?

And so I mused, not so well satisfied with myself as I had been in the first flush of victory, and not so sure that my occupation was so potent and indispensable an aid to education as I had thought. Meanwhile my mind was becoming calmer, and all my senses soothed under the influence of the subtle narcotic, whose fragrant exhalations rose and curled around, obscuring with friendly mist the too real images which haunted me; and I became more and more rapt into Cloudland; and fantastic shapes began

to come and go, which gradually assumed more definite forms, such as I could recognise, or seemed to recognise. It was not truly recognition, for these forms were not of earth. Nay, the very clouds which I thought just now were issuing from my lips and from the bowl with which they were connected, issued from no orifice of terrestrial clay. They had been gathered by the great Cloud-Gatherer, the Father of Gods and men, the wielder of the Thunderbolt, at whose nod Olympus trembles; and as they rolled asunder, I saw the enthroned majesty of Zeus. The clouds lifted and parted yet more, and I knew that I was in the presence of the whole Olympian assembly of Gods congregated evidently in solemn council. I trembled to think what my fate might be if I were discovered; I, a wretched mortal whose trade was examination,-if it were supposed that I had come to report upom the unexaminable denizens of Olympus. But they regarded me not; and listening in awe-struck silence I was able to test the accuracy of Dr. Smith's Dictionary of Mythology.

They were all there. There sat Here with her large clear eyes, gazing majestically and unconcernedly upon the scene; there stood the grey-eyed Athene, looking sterner than I had ever pictured her or seen her pictured; there stood the laughter-loving Aphrodite, coquetting still with Ares, in spite of the glowering looks of the swarthy Hephæstus; there was Apollo, eagerly conversing with the Muses, who looked decidedly sad and out of spirits in spite of his consolation; there was Poseidon too, looking rather out of his element; and somewhat in the background Heracles and Hebe and Bacchus, all rubicund and robust; while the rosy-fingered Aurora bent tenderly over the bath-chair of Tithonus. Besides these, a host of lesser Deities, whom it would be tedious to specify, were grouped around. And as I wondered why this conclave was thus assembled, as it were for my inspection, and began

to think of making notes for some subsequent examination, I saw Athene come forward, and in prostrate attitude embrace the knees of Zeus.

"Oh great and honoured father of Gods and men" (thus she prayed, and at her voice all the Immortals were hushed in silence to hear what the Goddess of Wisdom would say), “grant thy daughter this boon. Surely thou dost not forget the day when thou grantedst to mortals the gift of Wisdom, and sentest me forth from thine own august head ready equipped in full panoply to conquer the ignorance of the human race. Gladly did they receive and welcome me, and built temples in mine honour, and worshipped me with many sacrifices, freely and not compelled by fear or desire of gain, but acknowledging my beauty and supremacy. And I led among them in my train and made known to them the daughters of Memory, my handmaidens, who inspired them with love for divine learning and raised many above their fellows; so that men first wrote in the harmonies of immortal verse, and praised Gods and heroes, ay and glorified the deeds of men in history. And in succeeding generations others have spent their lives in studying the words of those pioneers of Wisdom, and midnight lamps have burned in mine honour; till the light of Knowledge kindled the dull hearts of mortals in which the Promethean fire slumbered, and shone throughout the world. And I and my handmaidens rejoiced as the numbers of our worshippers increased, though some went down to Hades before their time, worn out by their labours, but handing on their unextinguished lamps to others, and leaving behind them treasures which all the world might inherit. But now, oh father Zeus, some envious power has usurped our rights, despising thee and the offspring of thy teeming brain; and, lo! a race of men has sprung up who deride our worship and mock at our holy rites, while they themselves do homage only to Heracles and Hebe, whom thou hast allowed to be united in disastrous wed

lock; who are mighty indeed in form and bodily strength and ruddiness of complexion, but deficient in ethereal essence and aesthetic beauty, resembling more the infatuated Titans who dared once to wage war against thy Sovereignty. But they suffered the just reward of their arrogance; not so these newly-enrolled Gods, who are no Gods but overgrown men and women; in whose veins flows not the true ichor of the Gods purified by the crystal nectar of the Castalian spring or the effervescing vigour of the Apollinarian well, but common purple blood, fattened and engrossed by the too abundant gifts of Dionysus their boon companion, or the fermented produce of Demeter, not for such a purpose given to laborious mortals. Nay, even their offspring, Might and Violence, are held in unseemly honour by youths, who leap and run and contend in athletic sports, not such as of old enlivened the plain of Alpheus, but contending for silver goblets and the favour of idle maidens, whom the shameless Aphrodite urges to be present and gaze smiling upon the giddy throng. But do thou, oh King of Gods and men, seek out and punish as is fitting this envious Spirit, and restore the true and genuine love of knowledge which exalts the youth, and crowns the aged with undying fame."

She ceased, and ere Heracles could take his lips from the bowl which Hebe held to them, the aged Tithonus, in quavering and shrill utterance like the chirping of the cicada in the dry summer heat, thus querulously began:

"Truly hast thou spoken, oh Goddess of Goddesses! Surely in former generations the votaries of Wisdom willingly bore a great weight of learning, such as those who are now mortals could not stand beneath. Yet they esteemed such burdens light, and rejoiced to bear them and to make them heavier. Such was I once, when my dear knees were light, and this head was not yet bare and polished as an Argive shield. Often sat I then studying through the night, until the mist-born Day-Spring arose in the

East, and smiling in at my window laid her rosy fingers on my pale cheeks, making me blush at her appearing. Thus it was that we were first joined in love and wedlock, and I became immortal, alas! in vain."

Then suddenly with loud laughter, such as the wild horse utters careering over the plain of Argos, him interrupted the overweening might of Heracles:- "Oh foolish one, helpless, a second time a child, grand old man no longer, cease thy boasting! Who can tell what thy nights of toil were worth? Thou wast never examined! Behold, mortals nowadays have to render an account of their learning, and I do not wonder at all if they have no great care to practise the works of Athene and the Muses as of old. For they are like geese which are crammed with food for the feasts of men, only that trial may be made of their fatness and they may haply be plucked of their feathers. Small marvel is it to me if they prefer to worship the givers of muscle, and to practise the sports that harden the limbs and ward off disease from the liver." Thus spake the might of Heracles, and Ares and Aphrodite clapped their hands in loud approval; while Athene sternly bent her brows in anger.

But the Father of Gods and men thus addressed her, comforting her with kindly words: "Rise, my daughter, and be not downcast in thy soul, nor heed the winged words that have leaped over the park-paling of his teeth. For in good sooth his overweening speech, though hostile to thee, has yet pointed out the cause of that which distresses thee, and the remedy for thy grief. Truly he spoke, saying that those who are examined have no longer a care to seek voluntarily the gifts of the Muses and the renown of heavenly Wisdom, as their forefathers did, who suffered not this plague and trouble. Often have I looked down upon the earth, and beheld the Demon of Examination wandering to and fro among the haunts of men, insatiable, irrepres