As I noted herself and her ways critically, I thought that there was really no reason why we should not establish these Domestic Aid Agencies in England. We are not usually very slow in adopting socially economic ideas which have once suggested themselves to us, and if enterprise and capital united were to take the notion up, the chief sources of English domestic worry would be soon put an end to, as would also the reluctance of respectable girls to adopt what is at present in only too many cases nothing better than a life of dull, miserable slavery.
The meal ended, and the things all cleared away, Alice O’Reilly’s work for the day was over, and she betook herself to her own quarters, in order to prepare for the evening’s innocent jollities, while we again reverted to our comparisons of the social conditions of our respective countries. I believe that the hardest nut which I gave the Saville family to crack was my statement that when I last remembered being at home, the English Government had consigned some zealous partisans of Irish liberty to the temporary seclusion of some gaols in Ireland, which I was now assured had long ceased to exist. It was in vain that I insisted; and when I spoke of Queen Victoria, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Parnell as living contemporaneously with myself, the amusement of my friends was, in its turn, amusing to witness.
“I wouldn’t be surprised, after that,” said John Saville, “to hear that you claim personal acquaintance with the immortal writer of Hamlet and Macbeth.”
“Do you allude to Shakespeare or Bacon?” I queried innocently.
“Bacon? I know nothing of Bacon,” retorted John Saville. “But I am very much in love with the works of a certain William Shakespeare.”
“You think you are. Shakespeare did not write the plays bearing his name. The real author was Bacon, as several individuals have set themselves to prove.”
“I am afraid they have proved their case but badly. For while all our scholars have Shakesperian quotations at their tongues’ ends, there is not one of us who has ever heard a whisper of any presumed Baconian origin of our best loved classics.”
Poor Mr. Donnelly!
From playwright to novelist was a natural transition; and, remembering sundry financial bruisings in connection with the publication of one of my earliest and lengthiest novels, a glow of exultation possessed me when I learnt the conditions under which books were published nowadays.
The long-suffering author had triumphed at last, and his erstwhile oppressor was shorn of his glory. I was told that the State had established an immense Literary Bureau, with which large printing and publishing works were associated. All works other than already licensed newspapers and magazines intended for publication were submitted in the first instance to the Bureau, and read by the official censor.