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 wi