ustrous as ebony." These
are not the most besetting dangers of more modern steersmen: what we have
to guard against now is neither a repetition of the pedantries of
Steevens nor a recrudescence of the moralities of Ulrici. Fresh follies
spring up in new paths of criticism, and fresh labourers in a fruitless
field are at hand to gather them and to garner. A discovery of some
importance has recently been proclaimed as with blare of vociferous
trumpets and flutter of triumphal flags; no less a discovery than
this--that a singer must be tested by his song. Well, it is something
that criticism should at length be awake to that wholly indisputable
fact; that learned and laborious men who can hear only with their fingers
should open their eyes to admit such a novelty, their minds to accept
such a paradox, as that a painter should be studied in his pictures and a
poet in his verse. To the common herd of students and lovers of either
art this may perhaps appear no great discovery; but that it should at
length have dawned even upon the race of commentators is a sign which in
itself might be taken as a presage of new light to come in an epoch of
miracle yet to be. Unhappily it is as yet but a partial revelation that
has been vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of the apocalyptic fact
that a workman can only be known by his work, and that without
examination of his method and material that work can hardly be studied to
much purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a further truth no
less recondite and abstruse than this; that as the technical work of a
painter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals to
the ear. It follows that men who have none are as likely to arrive at
any profitable end by the application of metrical tests to the work of
Shakespeare as a blind man by the application of his theory of colours to
the work of Titian.

It is certainly no news to other than professional critics that no means
of study can be more precious or more necessary to a student of
Shakespeare than this of tracing the course of his work by the growth and
development, through various modes and changes, of his metre. But the
faculty of using such means of study is not to be had for the asking; it
is not to be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is not to be secured
by the learning of years, it is not to be attained by the devotion of a
life. No proficiency in grammar and arithmetic, no science of numeration