w to study. It is only after
our little store of facts has been laboriously accumulated, after we
have tried path after path that promised to take us by an easy way up
the Hill Difficulty, and have abandoned each in turn,--it is only when
we have attained a point somewhere near the top, that we can look down
and see the way we should have come, the one road that avoided
unnecessary steepness and needless windings, and led by the quickest and
easiest direction to the summit. The knowledge that we have thus gained,
however late to profit by it ourselves, should at least be valuable to
others. But, unfortunately, as Balzac has said, experience is an article
that no one will use at second hand. When the great teachers of the
world, who have been its most patient scholars, shall go to work to
teach us how to study, and when we are content to learn, then we shall
all be in a fair way to become sages.

But, in the mean time, there are two things we must apprehend--truisms
both of them, but, like all truisms, better known theoretically than
practically. The first is, that we must not use a microscope if we want
to study the stars; and the second is, that we must beware of having a
fly between the lenses of our telescope, unless we wish to discover a
monster in the moon. If a discriminating public would not consider it an
insult, one might add, in the third place, that it is useless to look
for lunar rainbows in the daytime.

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 se