A nun is on her knees before a man in a short flared skirt.

Reader, if by fortunate chance you have a son of tender years—the age is best from the sixth to the eleventh summer—or in lieu of a son, a nephew, only a few years in pants—mere shoots of nether garments not yet descending to the knees—doubtless, if such fortunate chance be yours, you went on one or more occasions last summer to a circus.

If the true holiday spirit be in you—and you be of other sort, I’ll not chronicle you—you will have come early to the scene for a just examination of what mysteries and excitements are set forth in the side-shows. Now if you be a man of humane reasoning, you will stand lightly on your legs, alert to be pulled this way or that as the nepotic wish shall direct, whether it be to the fat woman’s booth or to the platform where the thin man sits with legs entwined behind his neck, in delightful promise of what joy awaits you when you have dropped your nickel in the box and gone inside. To draw your steps, it is the showman’s privilege to make what blare he please upon the sidewalk; to puff his cheeks with robustious announcement.

If by further fortunate chance, you are addicted, let us say, in the quieter hours of winter, to writing of any kind—and for your joy, I pray that this be so, whether this writing be in massive volumes, or obscure and unpublished beyond its demerit—if such has been your addiction, you have found, doubtless, that your case lies much like the fat woman’s; that it is the show you give before the door that must determine what numbers go within—that, to be plain with you, much thought must be given to the taking of your title. It must be a most alluring trumpeting, above the din of rival shows.

So I have named this article with thought of how I might stir your learned curiosity. I have set scholars’ words upon my platform, thereby to make you think how prodigiously I have stuffed the matter in. And all this while, my article has to do only with a certain set of Shakespeare in nine calfskin volumes, edited by a man named John Bell, now long since dead, which set happens to have stood for several years upon my shelves; also, how it was disclosed to me that he was the worst of all editors, together with the reasons thereto and his final acquittal from the charge.

John Bell has stood, for the most part, in unfingered tranquillity, for I read from a handier, single volume. Only at cleaning times has he been touched, and then but in the common misery with all my books. Against this cleaning, which I take to be only a quirk of the female brain, I have often urged that the great, round earth itself has been subjected to only one flood, and that even that was a failure, for, despite Noah’s shrewdness at the gangway, villains still persist on it. How then shall my books profitably endure a deluge both autumn and spring?

Thereafter, when the tempest has spent itself and the waters have returned from off my shelves, I’ll venture in the room. There will be something different in the sniff of the place, and it will be marvelously picked up. Yet I can mend these faults. But it does fret me how books will be standing on their heads. Were certain volumes only singled out to stand upon their heads, Shaw for one, and others of our moderns, I would suspect the housemaid of expressing in this fashion a sly and just criticism of their inverted beliefs. I accused her on one occasion of this subtlety, but was met by such a vacant stare that I acquitted her at once. However, as she leaves my solidest authors also on their heads, men beyond the peradventure of such antics, I must consider it but a part of her carelessness, for which I have warned her twice. Were it not for her cunning with griddlecakes, to which I am much affected, I would have dismissed her before this.

And now this Bell, which has ridden out so many of my floods, is proclaimed to me a villain. We had got beyond the April freshets and there was in consequence a soapy smell about. It is clear in my mind that a street organ had started up a gay tune and that there were sounds of gathering feet. I was reading at the time, in the green rocker by the lamp, a life of John Murray, by one whose name I have forgotten, when my eyes came on the sentence that has shaken me. Bell, it said, Bell of my own bookshelf, of all the editors of Shakespeare was the worst.

In my agitation I removed my glasses, breathed upon the lenses, and polished them. Here was one of my familiars accused of something that was doubtless heinous, although in what particulars I was at a loss to know. It came on me suddenly. It was like a whispered scandal, sinister in its lack of detail. All that I had known of Bell was that its publication had dated from the eighteenth century. Yet its very age had seemed a patent of respectability. If a thing does not rot and smell in a hundred and forty years, it would seem to be safe from corruption: it were true peacock. But here at last from Bell was an unsavory whiff. My flood had abated only a fortnight since, and here was a stowaway escaped. Bell was proclaimed a villain. Again had a flood proved itself a failure.

Now, I feel no shame in having an outsider like Murray display to me these hidden evils; for I owe no inquisitorial duty to my books. There are people who will not admit a volume to their shelves until they have thrown it open and laid its contents bare. This is the unmannerly conduct of the customs wharf. Indeed, it is such scrutiny, doubtless, that induces some authors to pack their ideas obscurely, thereby to smuggle them. However, there being now a scandal on my shelves, I must spy into it.

John Murray, wherein I had read the charge, had been such a friendly, tea-and-gossip book, not the kind to hiss a scandal at you. It was bound in blue cloth and was a heavy book, so that I held it on a cushion. (And this device I recommend to others.) It was the kind of book that stays open at your place, if you leave it for a moment to poke the fire. Some books will flop a hundred pages, to make you thumb them back and forth, though whether this be the binder’s fault or a deviltry set therein by their authors I am at a loss to say. But Shaw would be of this kind, flopping and spry to mix you up. And in general, Shaw’s humor is like that of a shell-man at a country fair—a thimble-rigger. No matter where you guess that he has placed the bean, you will be always wrong. Even though you swear that you have seen him slip it under, it’s but his cunning to lead you off. But Murray was not that kind. It would stand at its post, unhitched, like a family horse.

Here was quandary. I looked at Bell, but God forgive me, it was not with the old trustfulness. He was on the top shelf but one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. I had set him thus conspicuous with intention, because of his calfskin binding, quite old and worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? (I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, from a cart, cheap, because a volume was missing.)

And now it seemed he was in some sort a villain. Although shocked, I felt a secret joy. For somewhat too broadly had Bell smirked his sanctity on me. When piety has been flaunting over you, you will steal a slim occasion to proclaim a flaw. There is much human nature goes to the stoning of a saint. In my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company of the decorous Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell. It is not that I admire that chaste assembly. But it were monstrous, even so, that I should neighbor them with this Bell, who, as it appeared, was no better than a wolf in calf’s clothing. It was Little Red Riding Hood, you will recall, who mistook a wolf for her grandmother. And with what grief do we look on her unhappy end!

My hand was now raised to drag Bell out by the heels, when I reflected that what I had heard might be unfounded gossip, mere tattle, and that before I turned against an old acquaintance, it were well to set an inquiry afoot. First, however, I put him alongside Herbert Spencer. If it were Bell’s desire to play the grandmother to him, he would find him tough meat.

Bell, John—I looked him up, first in volume Aus to Bis of the encyclopedia, without finding him, and then successfully in the National Biography—Bell, John, was a London bookseller. He was born in 1745, published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774, and after this assault, with the blood upon him, lived fifty years. This was reassuring. It was then but a bit of wild oats, no hanging matter. I now went at the question deeply. Yet I left him awhile with the indigestible Herbert.It was in 1774 that Bell squirted his dirty ink. In The Gentleman’s Magazine for that year appear mutterings from America, since called the Boston Tea Party. I set this down to bring the time more warmly to your mind, for a date alone is but a blurred signpost unless you be a scholar. And it is advisedly that I quote from this particular periodical, because its old files can best put the past back upon its legs and set it going. There is a kind of history-book that sorts the bones and ties them all about with strings, that sets the past up and bids it walk. Yet it will not wag a finger. Its knees will clap together, its chest fall in. Such books are like the scribblings on a tombstone; the ghost below gives not the slightest squeal of life. But slap it shut and read what was written hastily at the time on the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine, and it will be as though Gabriel had blown a practice toot among the headstones. It is then that you will get the gibbering of returning life.

So it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of Shakespeare. Bell was not a man of the schools. Caring not a cracked tinkle for learning, it was not to the folios, nor to any authority that he turned for the texts of his plays. Instead, he went to Drury Lane and Covent Garden and took their acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw the gallery laugh.

A few nights later, having by grace of God escaped a dinner out, and being of a consequence in a kindly mood, the scandal, too, having somewhat abated in my memory, I took down a brown volume and ran my fingers over its sides and along its yellow edges. Then I made myself comfortable and opened it up.

There is nothing to-day more degenerate than our title-pages. It is in a mean spirit that we pinch and starve them. I commend the older kind wherein, generously ensampled, is the promise of the rich diet that shall follow. At the circus, I have said, I’ll go within that booth that has most allurement on its canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the door, my money is already in my palm. Thus of a book I demand an earnest on the title-page.

Bell’s title-page is of the right kind. In the profusion and variety of its letters it is like a printer’s sample book, with tall letters and short letters, dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the text. There are slim letters and again the very progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes on the page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater.

There follows the subscribers’ list. It is a Mr. Tickle’s set that has come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a greeting from the past.

Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as on the repeating of a comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic on the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling hospital—sentences unparented, ideas abandoned of their proper text. “Where grief is to be expressed,” says Bell, “the right hand laid slowly on the left breast, the head and chest bending forward, is a just expression of it…. Ardent affection is gained by closing both hands warmly, at half arm’s length, the fingers intermingling, and bringing them to the breast with spirit…. Folding arms, with a drooping of the head, describe contemplation.” I have put it to you and you can judge it.

Let us consider Bell’s marginalia of the plays! Every age has importuned itself with words. Reason was such a word, and fraternity, and liberty. Efficiency, maybe, is the latest, though it is sure that when you want anything done properly, you have to fight for it. It is below the dignity of my page to put a plumber on it, yet I have endured occasions! This word efficiency, then, comes from our needs and not from our accomplishment. It is at best a marching song, not a shout of victory. It is when the house is dirty that the cry goes up for brooms.

So Bell in the notes upon the margins of his pages echoes a world that is talking about delicacy, about sentiment, about equality. (For a breeze blows up from France.) It was these words that the eighteenth century most babbled when it grew old. It had horror for what was low and vulgar. It wore laces on its doublet front, and though it seldom washed, it perfumed itself. And all this is in Bell, for his notes are a running comment of a shallow, puritanistic prig, who had sharp eyes and a gossip’s tongue. This was the time, too, when such words as blanket were not spoken by young ladies if men were about; for it is a bedroom word and therefore immoral. Bell objected from the bottom of his silly soul that Lady Macbeth should soil her mouth with it. “Blanket of the dark,” he says, “is an expression greatly below our author. Curtain is evidently better.” “Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?” Whereat Bell again complains that Lady Macbeth is “unnecessarily indelicate.” “Though this tragedy,” says Bell, “must be allowed a very noble composition, it is highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism. We would not wish to see young, unsettled minds to peruse this piece without proper companions to prevent absurd prejudices.”

It must appear from this, that, although one gains no knowledge of Shakespeare, one does gain a considerable knowledge of Bell and of his time. And this is just as well. For Bell’s light on Shakespeare would be but a sulphur match the more at carnival time. Indeed, Shakespeare criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is down such an alley that Bell’s smoking light goes wandering off.

As I read Bell this night, it is as though I listen at the boxes and in the pit, in that tinkling time of ’seventy-four. The patched LÆtitia sits surrounded by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the vapors. Next to her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with “grenadier head-dress.” “The Rivals” has yet to be written. London still hears “The Beggar’s Opera.” Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is the age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe’s false ringlets, of odes to red heels and epics to lap dogs, of tinseled struttings in gilded drawing-rooms. It was town-and-alley, this age; and though the fields lay daily in their new creation with sun and shadow on them, together with the minstrelsy of the winds across them and the still pipings of leaf and water, London, the while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack! And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London? Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one? London was so certain it was the center of circumambient space. Tintinnabulate, little Bell!

So you see that the head and front of Bell’s villainy was that he was a little man with an abnormal capacity for gossip. If gossip, then, be a gallows matter, let Bell unbutton him for the end. On the contrary, if gossip be but a trifle, here were a case for clement judgment.

In the first place, there is no vice of necessity in gossip. This must be clearly understood. It is proximity in time and place that makes it intolerable. A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in history may be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little “skike.” But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit him virtuous.

A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every community is a gossip and there are others still blooming and tender, who we know will live to be leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries do not recognize this truth is a shame to their perception. Ancestral lesions should bulk for them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. For it is by thinking of ourselves that we die. It leads to rheums and indigestions and off we go. And even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one old lady who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a knot-hole appearing in her garden fence.

It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water that has chief potency; or whether, so many being met together each morning at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of news that leads to convalescence. It is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the bit be spicy. There was a famous cure, I’m told, though I answer not for the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than that a deeper scandal being hissed about (a lady’s maid affair), all the inmates became distracted from their own complaints, and so, being made new, departed. To this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs.

This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged by its effects. If it allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead of punishment. And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. It is true he had given me no “chill and arid knowledge” of Shakespeare, but I had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time. It were justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and give Bell full acquittal.

No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him tenderly from the shelf where I had sequestered him. Volume seven was on its head, but I set it upright. Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is my custom. At the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chaste Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell.

He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf but one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?