not how he wrote
his plays. I could teach a poodle to do that in half an hour. But the
problem is--What made him leave off writing just when he was beginning
to know how to do it? It is as if I had left off writing plays ten years
ago."

"Perhaps," said the stranger, hesitatingly and modestly, "he had made
enough money by writing plays to retire on his earnings and live in the
country."

Nobody took any notice of this remark.

"If Bacon was really the playwright," said Lockton, "the problem is a
very different one."

"If Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays," said Silvester, "they
wouldn't have been so bad."

"There seems to me to be only one argument," said Professor Morgan, "in
favour of the Bacon theory, and that is that the range of mind displayed
in Shakespeare's plays is so great that it would have been child's play
for the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays to have written the works of
Bacon."

"Yes," said Hall, "but because it would be child's play for the man
who wrote my plays to have written your works and those of Professor
Newcastle--which it would--it doesn't prove that you wrote my plays."

"Bacon was a philosopher," said Willmott, "and Shakespeare was a poet--a
dramatic poet; but Shakespeare was also an actor, an actor-manager, and
only an actor-manager could have written the plays."

"What do you think of the Bacon theory?" asked Faubourg of the stranger.

"I think," said the stranger, "that we shall soon have to say eggs and
Shakespeare instead of eggs and Bacon."

This remark caused a slight shudder to pass through all the guests, and
Mrs. Bergmann felt sorry that she had not taken decisive measures to
prevent the stranger's intrusion.

"Shakespeare wrote his own plays," said Sciarra, "and I don't know if he
knew law, but he knew _le coeur de la femme_. Cleopatra bids her slave
find out the colour of Octavia's hair; that is just what my wife, my
Angelica, would do if I were to marry some one in London while she was
at Rome."

"Mr. Gladstone used to say," broke in Lockton, "that Dante was inferior
to Shakespeare, because he was too great an optimist."

"Dante was not an optimist," said Sciarra, "about the future life of
politicians. But I think they were both of them pessimists about man and
both optimists about God."

"Shakespeare," began Blenheim; but he was interrupted by Mrs. Duncan who
cried out:--

"I wish he were alive now and would write me a part, a real woman's
part. The