"Cochin-Chinese Shakespeare, indeed!" said Dick Jones, at the next symposium. "Why, judging from the copious extracts you gave from his greatest drama, Baby Bantam, it is _the_ most tedious drivel. You might have written it yourself. Where is the Shakespearean quality of this, which is, you say, the whole of Act Thirteen? "'Hang-ho: Out, Fu-sia, does your mother know you are? "'Fu-sia: I have no mother, but I have a child.'" "Where is the Shakespearean quality?" repeated Andrew. "Do you not feel the perfect pathos of those two lines, the infiniteness of incisive significance? To me they paint the whole scene in two strokes of matchless simplicity, strophe and anti-strophe. Fu-sia the repentant outcast and Hang-ho whose honest love she rejected, stand out as in a flash of lightning. Nay, Shakespeare himself never wrote an act of such tragic brevity, packed so full of the sense of anagke. Why, so far from it being tedious drivel, a lady in whose opinion I have great confidence and to whom I sent my article, told me afterwards that she couldn't sleep till she had read it." [Illustration: "_She told me she couldn't sleep till she had read it._"] The Mutual Depreciation Society burst into a roar of laughter and Andrew realized that he had put his foot into it. "Don't you think it a shame," broke in Frank Grey, "that we English are debarred from having a Shakespeare. There's been one discovered lately in Belgium, and we have already a Dutch Shakespeare, a French Shakespeare, a German Shakespeare, and an American Shakespeare. English is the only language in which we can't get one. It seems cruel that we should be just the one nation in the world to be cut off from having a nineteenth century Shakespeare. Every patriotic Briton must surely desire that we could discover an English Shakespeare to put beside these vaunted foreign phenomena." "But an English Shakespeare is a bull," said Patrick Boyle, who had a keen eye for such. "Precisely. A John Bull," replied Frank. "Peace. I would willingly look out for one," said Andrew Mackay, thoughtfully. "But I cannot venture to insinuate yet that Shakespeare did not write English. The time is scarcely ripe, though it is maturing fast. Otherwise the idea is tempting." "But why take the words in their natural meaning?" demanded Tom Brown, the philosopher, in astonishment. "Is it not unapparent that an English Shakespeare would be a great writer more saturated with Anglo-Saxon spirit than Shakespeare, who was cosmic and for all time and for every place? Hamlet, Othello, Lady Macbeth--these are world-types, not English characters. Our English Shakespeare must be more autochthonic, more chauviniste; or more provincial and more _borné_, if you like to put it that way. His scenes must be rooted in English life, and his personages must smack of British soil." There was much table-thumping when the philosopher ceased.