THE remarks of our valued cotemporary in regard to our defence of the New Shakspere Society are both facetious and irrelevant. We fail to see what the Aristotelian ???, or a Chinese pick-pocket, or the Royal Asiatic Society has to do with the subject in hand. Nor should our valued cotemporary complain of "athletic tabular views and ornithological ghost-stories," so long as they furnish a text for its widely famed humorous pieces. And when, as a parting thrust, it playfully insinuates that the Crimson is beyond its depth in speaking of matters Shaksperian, it is guilty of a degree of arrogant vanity which we confess we did not anticipate. There is, indeed, little in the editorial article in question that needs refutation : the New Shakspere Society will not suffer very severely under so ill-considered an attack. Granted that its members may have made mistakes; granted that Mr. Furnivall's attack upon Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps was unjust as the Advocate's own attack upon the Society; granted that Mr. Aldis Wright, whose ability we are not disposed to question, considers Mr. Hudson (whom we certainly did not confound with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps) a critic whose opinion is worth hearing (a marvellous circumstance, surely, since the latter confines himself almost entirely to the "sign-post criticism" which the former deprecates); granted that Professor Child has on one or two occasions found it necessary to disagree with some of his fellow Shaksperians, - what have all these specious accusations to do with the matter under discussion? They will not alter the fact that the real successes in Shakspere criticism have latterly been achieved mainly by the society which the Advocate affects to despise. The method of study by which the plays have assumed some chronological shape, by which metrical tests have been consistently applied, by which the growth of style can be traced, by which we arrive at some knowledge of the poet's mind and art, - these things are due in large part to the "very erratic kite." But the Advocate has happily reduced the question to a mathematical formula, - the Alpha and Omega from which there is no appeal : Mr. Wright = Dowden + Furnivall + ???. This is very pretty, and it doubtless satisfies the ingenious inventors; but more exact Shaksperian scholars will not accept it as proof of the "lunacy" of either Mr. Dowden or Mr. Furnivall. We do not propose to defend the latter gentleman in the use of language which he doubtless regrets sincerely as do we ourselves; we do not propose to assent to any errors which the New Shakspere Society may have made; but despite the Advocate, and despite Mr. Algernon Charles Billingsgate Bilgewater Swinburne, we still insist that the Society has earned for itself the gratitude, not the abuse, of all Shaksperian students whose opinions are worth any thing at all. We fear that our cotemporary has failed in the present instance to display "that firm grasp of the subject in hand, and that broad but minute knowledge of the grounds of discussion which generally characterize" its editorial articles. We shall hardly consider it worth while longer to occupy our columns with this futile dispute.