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!