I think I like Shakespeare's expurgated poems best, and I often wish that he had confined himself entirely to that kind. If I had a son who seemed to lean toward poesy and felt like twanging his lyre now and then, I would advise him to write expurgated poems exclusively.
I do not say that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, and it would not look well in me to set up my opinion in opposition to that of scholars, experts and savants who have had more advantages than I have, for I would never take advantage of any one; but I say that somehow the impression has crept into the papers that he was a pretty good little play-writer, and I am glad that Mr. Childs has had a testimonial made and sent over to England that will show an appreciation, at least, of his ability to keep before the people.
It will be noticed by the alert and keen-scented littérateur that I have carefully avoided treading on the tail of Mr. Donnelly's cipher. Being rather a poor mathematician anyway, I will not introduce the cipher at this time, but I will say that although the whole thing happened about three hundred years ago, and has now nearly passed out of my mind, to the best of my recollection Shakespeare, though he was the son of a buckwheater, and though he married his wife with a poetic license, and though he left his family at Stratford rather than take them to live in a London flat, wrote the most of his plays with the assistance of an expurgator who was out of the city most all of the time.
I cannot show Shakespeare's ready wit better at this time than by telling of his first appearance on the stage as I remember it. He came quietly before the footlights with a roll of carpet under one arm and a tack hammer under the other. In those days it was customtomary to nail down stage carpets, and while doing so "Shake," as we all called him then, knocked the nail off his left thumb, whereupon he received an ovation from the audience. Some men would have been rattled and would have "called up," as we say, but Shakespeare was always ready to please his friends or respond to an encore; so putting his right thumb up against a large painted rock in a mountain scene, he obliged by knocking off the other thumb-nail.
Shakespeare wrote the poem called "Venus and Adonis," during the absence of his expurgator, and sent it to the editor of the Stratford Appeal, who deadheaded the paper to him for a year and told him that he wished he would write up any other gossip that might come to his knowledge in that part of the country, especially if it promised to be spicy.
Shakespeare was one of the few Englishmen who never visited this country for two weeks, for the purpose of writing an eight pound book on his impressions of America.
CHESTNUT-BURR II—HOW THE GLORIOUS FOURTH WAS CELEBRATED AT WHALEN'S GROVE LAST YEAR.
An Oration by a Self-Made Man which had Bones in it—Suggestions of Deep Interest to Taxpayers—Freedom as it Suggests Itself to a Hickory Township Man—Our Duties to a Common Country.