I had often wondered at this discrepancy between document and tradition. Last spring, when I was in Bath for a few days, my mind brooded especially on the question. Indeed, Bath, with her faded memories, her tristesse, drives one to reverie. Fashion no longer smiles from her windows nor dances in her sunshine, and in her deserted parks the invalids build up their constitutions. Now and again, as one of the frequent chairs glided past me, I wondered if its shadowy freight were the ghost of poor Romeo. I felt sure that the traditional account of his début was mainly correct. How could it, indeed, be false? Tradition is always a safer guide to truth than is the tale of one man. I might amuse myself here, in Bath, by verifying my notion of the début or proving it false. One morning I was walking through a narrow street in the western quarter of Bath, and came to the window of a very little shop, which was full of dusty books, prints and engravings. I spied in one corner of it the discoloured print of a queer, lean figure, posturing in a garden. In one hand this figure held a snuff-box, in the other an opera-hat. Its sharp features and wide grin, flanked by luxuriant whiskers, looked strange under a Caroline wig. Above it was a balcony and a lady in an attitude of surprise. Beneath it were these words, faintly lettered: Bombastes Coates wooing the Peerless Capulet, that's 'nough (that snuff) 1809. I coveted the print. I went into the shop. A very old man peered at me and asked my errand. I pointed to the print of Mr. Coates, which he gave me for a few shillings, chuckling at the pun upon the margin. 'Ah,' he said, 'they're forgetting him now, but he was a fine figure, a fine sort of figure.' 'You saw him?' 'No, no. I'm only seventy. But I've known those who saw him. My father had a pile of such prints.' 'Did your father see him?' I asked, as the old man furled my treasure and tied it with a piece of tape. 'My father, sir, was a friend of Mr. Coates,' he said. 'He entertained him in Gay Street. Mr. Coates was my father's lodger all the months he was in Bath. A good tenant, too. Never eccentric under my father's roof--never eccentric.' I begged the old bookseller to tell me more of this matter. It seemed that his father had been a citizen of some consequence, and had owned a house in modish Gay Street, where he let lodgings. Thither, by the advice of a friend, Mr. Coates had gone so soon as he arrived in the town, and had stayed there down to the day after his début, when he left for London. 'My father often told me that Mr. Coates was crying bitterly when he settled the bill and got into his travelling-chaise. He'd come back from the playhouse the night before as cheerful as could be. He'd said he didn't mind what the public thought of his acting. But in the morning a letter was brought for him, and when he read it he seemed to go quite mad.' 'I wonder what was in the letter!' I asked. 'Did your father never know who sent it?'