to find out what Irreverence really IS.

It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of
regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall
eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me. Then there will
be no more quarrelling, no more bandying of disrespectful epithets,
no more heart burnings.

There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-
Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me. That will
simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease. There will be
irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it. The first time
those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their
Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-
Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last. Taught
by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier offenders
by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet them.



CHAPTER XIII



Isn't it odd, when you think of it: that you may list all the
celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times,
clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five hundred
names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories, biographies
and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one
of them. Every one of them except one--the most famous, the most