and it
will be as though Gabriel had blown a practice toot among the headstones.
It is then that you will get the gibbering of returning life.

So it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of Shakespeare. Bell was
not a man of the schools. Caring not a cracked tinkle for learning, it was
not to the folios, nor to any authority that he turned for the texts of
his plays. Instead, he went to Drury Lane and Covent Garden and took their
acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very
plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for
word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with
pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw the gallery laugh.

A few nights later, having by grace of God escaped a dinner out, and being
of a consequence in a kindly mood, the scandal, too, having somewhat
abated in my memory, I took down a brown volume and ran my fingers over
its sides and along its yellow edges. Then I made myself comfortable and
opened it up.

There is nothing to-day more degenerate than our title-pages. It is in a
mean spirit that we pinch and starve them. I commend the older kind
wherein, generously ensampled, is the promise of the rich diet that shall
follow. At the circus, I have said, I'll go within that booth that has
most allurement on its canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest
voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the door,
my money is already in my palm. Thus of a book I demand an earnest on the
title-page.

Bell's title-page is of the right kind. In the profusion and variety of
its letters it is like a printer's sample book, with tall letters and
short letters, dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script
letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the text. There are
slim letters and again the very progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes
on the page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater.

There follows the subscribers' list. It is a Mr. Tickle's set that has
come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of
Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him
here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to
the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a greeting
from the past.

Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as
on the repeating of a comic story, it