y the position in which he placed himself;
slumber, however, was not his intent. He liked to rest after his midday
meal and think. There was no real loss of time in it--he had been at
work since half-past five.

His especial and striking characteristic was a very large, high, and
noble forehead--the forehead attributed to Shakespeare and seen in his
busts. Shakespeare's intellect is beyond inquiry, yet he was not
altogether a man of action. He was, indeed, an actor upon the stage;
once he stole the red deer (delightful to think of that!), but he did
not sail to the then new discovered lands of America, nor did he fight
the Spaniards. So much intellect is, perhaps, antagonistic to action, or
rather it is averse to those arts by which a soldier climbs to the
position of commander. If Shakespeare by the chance of birth, or other
accident, had had the order of England's forces, we should have seen
generalship such as the world had not known since Caesar.

His intellect was too big to climb backstairs till opportunity came. We
have great thoughts instead of battles.

Iden's forehead might have been sculptured for Shakespeare's. There was
too much thought in it for the circumstances of his life. It is possible
to think till you cannot act.

After the mice descended Iden did sleep for a few minutes. When he awoke
he looked at the clock in a guilty way, and then opening the oven of the
grate, took out a baked apple. He had one there ready for him almost
always--always, that is, when they were not ripe on the trees.

A baked apple, he said, was the most wholesome thing in the world; it
corrected the stomach, prevented acidity, improved digestion, and gave
tone to all the food that had been eaten previously. If people would
only eat baked apples they would not need to be for ever going to the
chemists' shops for drugs and salines to put them right. The women were
always at the chemists' shops--you could never pass the chemists' shops
in the town without seeing two or three women buying something.

The apple was the apple of fruit, the natural medicine of man--and the
best flavoured. It was compounded of the sweetest extracts and essences
of air and light, put together of sunshine and wind and shower in such a
way that no laboratory could imitate: and so on in a strain and with a
simplicity of language that reminded you of Bacon and his philosophy of
the Elizabethan age.

Iden in a way certainly had a tinge of the Baconian