PREFACE
SCENE—A snug and sequestered if cloudy corner of the Elysian Fields. Present, the Shades of Shakspeare and Bacon, engaged in reading Mr. Donelly's egregious lucubrations, not without such mild and mitigated mirth as becomes the locality. To them enters a small and sprightly Personage, light-footed, but of seeming cis-Stygian solidity.
Bacon
Shakspeare } (together). Hillo!
Mr. Punch. That sounds human. Savours rather of my own Fleet Street than of the realms of the other Rhadamanthus. What cheer, sweet Will? How fare you, Brother Francis?
[Salutes courteously.
Bacon. 'Twere affectation to ask who you are, Sir. The question, "How gat you here?" may perchance be more pertinent—and pardonable.
Mr. P. (airily). Oh, I had been for—say, the xth time—to see "Our Mary" in The Winter's Tale, and being more inclined for profitable talk than for sleep, I just took you on my way home.
Bacon (smiling). Marry, Mr. Punch, were the statement of sequence equivalent to the explanation of causation, yours would be a most satisfactory answer.
Shaks. (mildly). Be not too scientifically scrutinising, Brother Bacon. Mr. Punch, Puck and Ariel in one, is free of all places, lord of all latitudes, penetrator of all spheres, permeator of all elements.
Mr. P. True, sweet Will! How much more catholic, in comprehension, as in charity, is the creative mind than the merely critical one!
Bacon. Humph! That sounds Sphinxian. Heraclitus the Obscure was pellucid in comparison.
Mr. P. And yet, I warrant you, Master Shakspeare here could play the "Diver of Delos" where your pundit's plummet should not find bottom. However, "broad-browed Verulam," let not that brow's breadth cloud or corrugate in vexation at my persiflage. What do you read, Sir?
Shaks. "Words, words, words!"
Mr. P. "I mean the matter that you read."
Shaks. "Slanders, Sir." For the coney-catching rogue—one Donelly—says here——but of course you know what he says.
[The trio laugh Homerically, until the asphodels wag their white heads and convulse their starry corollas in sheer sympathy.
Bacon. By Democritus, laughter in these latitudes is seldom enough of this sort and compass.
Mr. P. To succeed in shaking the sides—of Bacon, here, is somewhat indeed, the greatest triumph, be sure, that awaits the incongruous Cryptogrammatist.
Shaks. Would that Ben Jonson were with us to join in the glorious guffaw.
Mr. P. Conceive Rare Ben being jockeyed into accepting you, his contemporary and tavern-companion, as the author of such "unconsidered trifles" as Hamlet and Lear, Othello and Macbeth, The Tempest and The Midsummer Night's Dream! Wer't ever at the "Mermaid," Verulam?
Bacon. Verily, Mr. Punch, I should like mightily to have joined in that company, just for once, and to have discussed the Cryptogram with the "Spanish great galleon" and the "English man-of-war" (as Fuller puts it), whom Donelly now desires to knock, as it were, into one curiously composite craft. Did not this same maker of mare's-nests indite a fantastic tome, full of bottomless argument and visionary particularity, concerning that fabled island or continent of Atlantis, which the Egyptian priest told Solon had been swallowed up by an earthquake?
Mr. P. Like enough, my Lord, like enough. Once a mare's-nester, always a mare's-nester. Nephelo-Coccygia was terra firma compared with the elaborate but evanescent Cloud-Cuckoolands of riddle-reading theory-mongers.
Shaks. When Œdipus gets crotchet-ridden the sooner the Sphinx devours him the better.
Mr. P. True, O Swan! Let the Great Brethren of British Genius be brethren still—twins, if you please, but twain. Verily it might almost pass the might of Mother Nature to round two such splendid orbs into one. Rare Ben had his tribute for you also, my Verulam. "No man ever spake more neatly, more purely, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered." Might have been said of Me!
Bacon. Praise shared with you is praise indeed! But the language of the Realm of Phantasy—Will's own world—the speech of Arcady, of Arden, of shadowy Elsinore, of Prospero's enchanted Isle—Will's native tongue—passeth many a league-long step beyond the "neatness" of the judgment-seat, or the "fulness" of the Novum Organum Scientiarum.
Mr. P. Well said, Wisdom!
Shaks. (chortling softly). Why, who knows? One day, perchance,—æons hence, of course,—some puzzle-headed pragmatist may propound the preposterous question, "Who wrote Punch?" From out the fathomless deeps of its many thousand wit-stored tomes the Donelly of that dim and distant future may readily dip up, in his poor bucket, a Cryptogram, to show that they were produced by a scientific syndicate, including Faraday and Mill, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, Darwin and the Duke of Argyll.
[At the mention of the Olympian and autocratic Scottish Sciolist, Homeric laughter bursts forth anew in yet fuller force.
Bacon. Prithee, sweet Will, don't! Shadowy sides can ache, I find, and then, what will Rhadamanthus think?
Mr. P. As Jupiter did when the adventurous Ixion intruded into Olympus, perhaps. Well, well, put aside that preposterous book, which, as you, my Lord Bacon, said of the Aristotelian method, is "only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of works for the benefit of the life of man," and, I may add, of immortals.
Shaks. (yawning). Not all reading, my Francis, makes a full man—save in the sense in which one may be filled with the East wind. My books were men. Not much that is novel in Nature, human or otherwise, to study in these shadowy realms. I miss the "Mermaid," and the mazy world which was my stage. Donelly's book is dull, however. Canst furnish us with a substitute, excellent Mr. Punch?
Mr. P. That can I, sweet Will. To that end indeed came I hither. As a popular stage-character—not one of your own—saith, "I hope I don't intrude." Ah, I thought not; but you needn't try (ineffectually) to wring my hands off, the pair of you. Behold!!!!!!
As Mr. Punch reluctantly turned his back upon Elysium, he left the two Illustrious Shades, prone side by side and cheek by jowl upon an asphodel bank, eagerly and diligently perusing his