_Bacon_ (_smiling_). Marry, Mr. PUNCH, were the statement of sequence equivalent to the explanation of causation, yours would be a most satisfactory answer. _Shaks._ (_mildly_). Be not too scientifically scrutinising, Brother BACON. Mr. PUNCH, _Puck_ and _Ariel_ in one, is free of all places, lord of all latitudes, penetrator of all spheres, permeator of all elements. _Mr. P._ True, sweet WILL! How much more catholic, in comprehension, as in charity, is the creative mind than the merely critical one! _Bacon._ Humph! That sounds Sphinxian. HERACLITUS the Obscure was pellucid in comparison. _Mr. P._ And yet, I warrant you, Master SHAKSPEARE here could play the "Diver of Delos" where your pundit's plummet should not find bottom. However, "broad-browed VERULAM," let not that brow's breadth cloud or corrugate in vexation at my persiflage. What do you read, Sir? _Shaks._ "Words, words, words!" _Mr. P._ "I mean the matter that you read." _Shaks._ "Slanders, Sir." For the coney-catching rogue--one DONELLY--says here----but of course you know _what_ he says. [_The trio laugh Homerically, until the asphodels wag their white heads and convulse their starry corollas in sheer sympathy._ _Bacon._ By DEMOCRITUS, laughter in these latitudes is seldom enough of this sort and compass. _Mr. P._ To succeed in shaking the sides--of BACON, _here_, is somewhat indeed, the greatest triumph, be sure, that awaits the incongruous Cryptogrammatist. _Shaks._ Would that BEN JONSON were with us to join in the glorious guffaw. _Mr. P._ Conceive Rare BEN being jockeyed into accepting _you_, his contemporary and tavern-companion, as the author of such "unconsidered trifles" as _Hamlet_ and _Lear_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_, _The Tempest_ and _The Midsummer Night's Dream_! Wer't ever at the "Mermaid," VERULAM? _Bacon._ Verily, Mr. PUNCH, I should like mightily to have joined in that company, just for once, and to have discussed the Cryptogram with the "Spanish great galleon" and the "English man-of-war" (as FULLER puts it), whom DONELLY now desires to knock, as it were, into one curiously composite craft. Did not this same maker of mare's-nests indite a fantastic tome, full of bottomless argument and visionary particularity, concerning that fabled island or continent of Atlantis, which the Egyptian priest told SOLON had been swallowed up by an earthquake? _Mr. P._ Like enough, my Lord, like enough. Once a mare's-nester, always a mare's-nester. Nephelo-Coccygia was _terra firma_ compared with the elaborate but evanescent Cloud-Cuckoolands of riddle-reading theory-mongers. _Shaks._ When OEDIPUS gets crotchet-ridden the sooner the Sphinx devours him the better.