ll me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
their will.

--Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most
enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so
much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.

--But _Hamlet_ is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind
of private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean, I don't
care a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty...

He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his
defiance. His private papers in the original. _Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim
in mo shagart_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.

Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:

--I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but
I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that
Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.

Bear with me.

Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under
wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca_. Messer
Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.

--As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,
from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist
weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where
it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff
time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image
of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination,
when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that
which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the
future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but
by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.

--Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from
the son.

Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.

--That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.

John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

--If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a
drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan
admired so much breathe another spirit.

--The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.

--There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a
s