thout
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 Laetitia 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