to make assurance doubly sure, but Lot’s wife, in looking backward, has recommended that the pig-tale be swallowed with a grain of salt. My dear Willie, your[Pg 37] poetry has pains in its feet, your rhyme has received the absent treatment, and your rythm, like your hair, is lacking.”

[Pg 37]

“Oh, well, hair doesn’t grow on brains,” retorted the claimant to “Hamlet.”

But Anon was not to be out-argued, and continued:

“A hirsute chrysanthemum growing on a man’s head is more likely to indicate a quarterback Freshman on the gridiron than a hunchback poet on the Mount of Parnassus. As for the poet’s other extreme, metrical feet are not always symmetrical.”

“That’s blank verse,” interrupted Shakespeare.

“You mean damn!” interjected Lord Bacon, profanely. “Let me lend you the metres, Bill, so that you may measure up to my standard, or else cork the rythmic bottle and spill no more mimic blood of red ink.”

“The gas man is the only person who controls my metre,” said the Bard of Avon, chuckling at his own wit. “You quite sweep me off my metaphorical feet. That may not be original, but I have no aspirations in the direction of originality.”

“The last broker who arrived from Wall Street[Pg 38] says that you are too full of quotations to be original,” sneered Lord Bacon.

[Pg 38]

“Have you forgotten that you once said ‘a man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others?’ Bartlett allows you seven pages, while he gives me more than a hundred. Familiarity breeds imitators. Even in quotations, you follow after me.”

“If you wear so long a face, you’ll stub your toe on your chin,” observed Anon, noting that Lord Bacon was getting the worst of his controversy with Shakespeare. “Never mind Bill’s raving. Burton tells him he larded his lean books with the fat of others’ works. Maybe that’s the reason why he gives his readers mental dyspepsia; to inwardly digest ‘Hamlet’ would disagree with the stomach of an ostrich. After all, the world knows that Shakespeare was not a man but a syndicate, to which I was the largest contributor. I’ll call the man a plagiarist who says I’m a liar.”

No one cared to knock off the verbal chip which Anon had put upon his shoulders, so Paul Jones resumed:

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