counting up of numbers and casting up of figures that a whole university—­nay, a whole universe of pedants could accomplish, no teacher and no learner will ever be a whit the nearer to the haven where they would be.  In spite of all tabulated statements and regulated summaries of research, the music which will not be dissected or defined, the “spirit of sense” which is one and indivisible from the body or the raiment of speech that clothes it, keeps safe the secret of its sound.  Yet it is no less a task than this that the scholiasts have girt themselves to achieve:  they will pluck out the heart not of Hamlet’s but of Shakespeare’s mystery by the means of a metrical test; and this test is to be applied by a purely arithmetical process.  It is useless to pretend or to protest that they work by any rule but the rule of thumb and finger:  that they have no ear to work by, whatever outward show they may make of unmistakable ears, the very nature of their project gives full and damning proof.  Properly understood, this that they call the metrical test is doubtless, as they say, the surest or the sole sure key to one side of the secret of Shakespeare; but they will never understand it properly who propose to secure it by the ingenious device of numbering the syllables and tabulating the results of a computation which shall attest in exact sequence the quantity, order, and proportion of single and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of regular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play by the horny eye and the callous finger of a pedant.  “I am ill at these numbers”; those in which I have sought to become an expert are numbers of another sort; but having, from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of the study of Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and found in it the chief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly think myself less qualified than another to offer an opinion on the metrical points at issue.

The progress and expansion of style and harmony in the successive works of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of Shakespearean students.  But to trace and verify the various shades and gradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences, the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in the spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task not less beyond the reach of a scholiast than beyond the faculties of a child.  He who would attempt it with any chance of profit must above all things remember at starting that the inner and the outer qualities of a poet’s work are of their very nature indivisible; that any criticism is of necessity worthless which looks to one side only, whether it be to the outer or to the inner quality of the work; that the fatuity of pedantic ignorance never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separate aesthetic from scientific criticism by