Beetle went up to College and to the Outer Library, where he had on tap the last of a book called Elsie Venner, by a man called Oliver Wendell Holmes—all about a girl who was interestingly allied to rattlesnakes. He finished what was left of her, and cast about for more from the same hand, which he found on the same shelf, with the trifling difference that the writer’s Christian name was now Nathaniel, and he did not deal in snakes. The authorship of Shakespeare was his theme—not that Shakespeare with whom King oppressed the Army Class, but a low-born, poaching, ignorant, immoral village lout who could not have written one line of any play ascribed to him. (Beetle wondered what King would say to Nathaniel if ever they met.) The real author was Francis Bacon, of Bacon’s Essays, which did not strike Beetle as any improvement. He had “done” the essays last term. But evidently Nathaniel’s views annoyed people, for the margins of his book—it was second-hand, and the old label of a public library still adhered—flamed with ribald, abusive, and contemptuous comments by various hands. They ranged from “Rot!” “Rubbish!” and such like to crisp counter-arguments. And several times some one had written: “This beats Delia.” One copious annotator dissented, saying: “Delia is supreme in this line,” “Delia beats this hollow.” “See Delia’s Philosophy, page so and so.” Beetle grieved he could not find anything about Delia (he had often heard King’s views on lady-writers as a class) beyond a statement by Nathaniel, with pencilled exclamation-points rocketting all round it that “Delia Bacon discovered in Francis Bacon a good deal more than Macaulay.” Taking it by and large, with the kind help of the marginal notes, it appeared that Delia and Nathaniel between them had perpetrated every conceivable outrage against the Head-God of King’s idolatry: and King was particular about his idols. Without pronouncing on the merits of the controversy, it occurred to Beetle that a well-mixed dose of Nathaniel ought to work on King like a seidlitz powder. At this point a pencil and a half sheet of impot-paper came into action, and he went down to tea so swelled with Baconian heresies and blasphemies that he could only stutter between mouthfuls. He returned to his labours after the meal, and was visibly worse at prep.
“I say,” he began, “have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote his own beastly plays?”
“’Fat lot of good to us!” said Stalky. “We’ve got to swot ’em up just the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s your biznai.” He read swiftly from the school Lear (Act II., Sc. 2) thus:
Steward:
“Never any:
It pleased the King his master, very late,
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;
When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure,
Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man,