This little excursion into the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries has helped, I trust, to support my suggestion that a poet's imagery reveals his own idiosyncrasies, and not only the usages of his period. Let us now look in more detail at the whole body of Shakespeare's images. With the aid of the chart (No. v), we can see my general classification of their subject-matter, and the proportion drawn from his various fields of interest. A consideration of these proportions will of itself throw light on his mind and interests.

The difference between references and images in this connection needs emphasising. We all know that lists of Shakespeare's references to various things, the law, school-books and learning, the Bible, religion, and so on, have been made out by enthusiasts who desire to prove from them that he at one time had been a lawyer's clerk or a schoolmaster, or that he was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic.

But mere references are quite different from images; and no computation of images only has, so far as I know, ever before been made out. A writer refers to a thing in quite a different mood and with quite a different poetic impulse from that which produces a simile or metaphor, which, in the case of Shakespeare certainly, comes usually with great spontaneity and under stress of heightened feeling.