The days at Stratford were so full of breakfasting, lunching, and dining, with lectures on folk dancing and folk singing, and debates on ethical and esthetical matters between, and drives into the country, and afternoon teas and calls, that it was with difficulty I could squeeze in or out an hour for so favorite diversion of mine as the Moving Picture Show. But at last the hour lent itself to the desire, and I went to that Picture Theater which does not feel itself too presumptuous in almost fronting the Shakespeare Monument. Perhaps it is kept in countenance by the badness of the monument in one art and its own excellence in another, but if I ventured into the Picture Theater without knowing its grounds for self-confidence my own trust in it was rewarded by the prevalence, so flattering to my patriotism, the almost exclusive prevalence, of American films in its events. The events were of that romantic character so easily attributable to the life of our Far West, and especially that life as it was touched, by the only a little more distinctively romantic life of our aborigines, still supposed to linger in a tribal condition before merging in our body politic as landholders in severalty and prospective citizens. In this condition they were provisionally making war on the white men, galloping round on their ponies along the brows and summits of hills which threw them into strong relief, and permitted them a splendor of action equally glorious in advance and retreat. Their forays were connected with the love-interest embodied in the reciprocal passion of a young lieutenant and the daughter of the commanding general, who conspired with an elderly colonel to frustrate their affection by throwing the lieutenant into the power of the savages, and securing his betrothed for his ranking officer. The betrayal and the rescue were effected with the incessant discharge of firearms, sensible to the eye only, between Indians and cowboys and cavalrymen, which eventuated in the triumph of the American forces with much waving of star-spangled banners.

The audience was composed almost wholly of schoolchildren; I was the only spectator distinctly in the decline of life; and among the children there was one of years so few and sensibilities so tender, that in spite of his sympathy with the American forces, he damped the general joy by bursting into a cry of alarm at the moment of their triumph, and having to be led howling up the aisle into the safety of the outer air. His grief touched me so that I could not take the pride I might have wished in the fact that of the six dramas presented that afternoon four were shown from American films, and two from French ones, with not a single English film among them, not even of those municipal receptions of royalty which the English fondness commonly wreaks itself in reproducing on the cinematographic screen, with little variety of costume for the king and an inflexible devotion to one walking dress and one austere, reproving hat in the queen.

I could not remain after this tragic incident, and I followed the emotional sufferer out, hoping to supply the reassurance which seemed to fall from his more immediate friends. But before I reached the door I was aware of one of these mystical presences at my shoulder which I was now grown used to, and which I supposed of course was Shakespeare. On the contrary, as I looked round, I saw that it was Bacon, and I said with surprise: "Oh! You here?"

"Yes," he said, with some resentment of my tone, "I am here a good deal, first and last."

"Yes?" I queried, to gain time, without committing myself further.

"Why don't these stupid people say something to comfort that little boy?" he demanded, without noting my query, and I perceived that his shadowy shape was in a quiver of compassion for the sensitive youngster. This ought not to have surprised me, and upon reflection I perceived that it was the logic of a man who had often been so pitiless in this life that he should be all pity in another life; that would be not only his eager atonement, his expiation; it would be his privilege, his highest happiness. To go through eternity compassionating every form of suffering here would be a refuge from vain regrets, and such solace as comes to us whenever we disown some misdeed by doing the opposite. I wished to speak with him on this point, but I saw he was not concerned with me; he was somehow addressing himself to the terrified child, who suddenly stopped his roaring and looked round smiling as if he expected to see a kind face at his shoulder. I knew he would see none, and Bacon instantly ceased to occupy himself with him.

"Yes," he resumed with me, "I think there is a great deal to be hoped from this sort of show, and I am interested in every advance made in its art. If I were in authority here I would not permit these spectacles of battle, or any terrifying circumstance. There is an infinite range of subjects which could be shown for the instruction as well as the delight of those little ones; all 'the fairy tales of science,' all the works of nature, all the beautiful and cheering events of history."

"I'm afraid the Shakespeareans would say," I answered, ''that you don't show the author-actor's instinct in that notion, and that such a notion alone was enough to disprove your friends' claim to your authorship of the plays. You know how bloody his scene is — and advisedly so. We like a noble terror — all but our young friend here."

He did not reply, but said: "I believe that in the United States you now have the characters in the films speaking: talking-movies, I think you call them. You are very graphic, you Americans!"

"Oh, thank you! They're not quite satisfactory, yet. There is speech, but it doesn't seem somehow to come from the speakers, though their lips move."

"You must trust your Mr. Edison to bring the affair to perfection. A most ingenious man; a sort of up-to-date version of your great Franklin. I don't wonder your people value him and have voted him one of your supreme benefactors."

"Your lordship must excuse me," I said, "if I'm still a little surprised that a philosopher like yourself, who changed the whole course, if not the nature, of philosophy, should be so much interested in people who are after all merely inventors, however beneficent."

"Have you read your Macaulay to so little pm-pose," he rejoined, "as not to have seen how he distinguishes between the new and the old philosophies in his essay on me by pointing out that my philosophy dedicated itself to use, while that of the Greeks disdained the practical as something beneath the notice of the idealist?"

"Yes, yes," I said, "I certainly remember that; and here I hesitated from an embarrassing recollection of the severity of Macaulay's essay on the facts of Bacon's career.

"I know he was terribly hard upon me in the first half of his essay," Bacon returned, as if I had spoken.

"But he let me have the last word, as it were. The whole second half of his essay is devoted to the recognition of my claim upon the forgiveness — I won't say gratitude — of mankind because of my wish to serve them in any humblest fashion, of my will always to hitch a star to my wagon, if I may transpose the saying of your Emerson: a very different sort of idealist, by the way, from Plato."

"I know," I answered. "I thought that fine in Macaulay. It was only fair, though, to let you have the last word."

"In my office of judge, in which I confessed and must always confess that I brought the judgment seat to shame, though I only did what the other judges did in my time, it often occurred to me that it was a gross injustice in our procedure to let the prosecution, the state, have the closing appeal to the jury. That should be the sacred right of the defense — "

"Ah, if you could only have expressed that in some axiom, embodied it in some decision!" I exclaimed. "That injustice is always a grief to me whenever I read the report of a criminal trial. That the last word should be for the rigor instead of the mercy of the law, that seems barbarous, atrocious."

"But as we were saying of the cinema — the movies, as you call it in your wonderful slang — I believe there is indefinite development for that form of the drama in the direction of education. But why am I saying this to you? You who first suggested the notion to me in one of your papers."

I was inexpressibly flattered. "Is it possible," I asked, "that so great a man as you, in your exalted sphere, keeps up with our periodical literature? How have you the tune for it?"

"We have the eternity for it," he said, with a sad smile for the word play. "Besides you exaggerate my importance in the world of immortality. I assure you that there the lowliest of our race who has only a record of humble goodness counts before me."

I stood rebuked. "Oh, excuse me; I didn't reflect. But now as to the movies: you see a great dramatic future in them?"

"Ah, that you must have out with Shakespeare. You'll find him in the gardens of the Birthplace; I've no doubt he'll try to persuade you that the Elizabethan drama was the last word in that way."

"Well, Shakespeare is always Shakespeare, you know!" I said.

"I'm glad he isn't always Bacon," the philosopher replied. "I shouldn't mind having written the sonnets; but the 'Venus and Adonis,' the 'Lucrece,' and some of the plays — excuse me! Honestly, would you like to have written 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' or 'A Comedy of Errors'?"

Before I could protest my companion had left me to continue my way to the Birthplace alone. It was only a little walk from the Picture Theater, but I was not surprised to find next morning had come when I reached the house endeared to the world by the universally cherished fiction that Shakespeare was bom in it. Thirteen thousand Americans are said to visit it every year, and I had already joined them twice in their tacit atonement there for the Baconian heresy which our nation invented. I had been there in fact only a few days before, and now I passed through the house into the garden without staying to visit the thronged rooms above or below. As I expected I found the shade of Shakespeare in the shelter of a far descendant of his contemporary mulberry-tree, and he courteously dematerialized me for the forbidden passage over the grass to a seat with him at its root.

"Well," he said, smiling, "so you have shirked even the birth-room in the Birthplace where I was not bom?"

"Yes — since you have divined it. I have no grudge against that superstition except that it has thronged the place so with the devout that one can't breathe there very well. Besides, I have done it twice already."

"And the Museum and Library, with the Original Legal Documents of the family possessions, and the signatures of my family (they seem to have abounded in autographs so much more than I), and the early editions of my plays, and my signet-ring, and my sixteenth-century school-desk, and all the rest of it? And the Timber-roofed Room overhead, with the portraits and poor old Quincy's begging letter to me? And the Kitchen and the Living-room, where we used to feed and foregather?"

"Yes; and revered everything with unquestioning faith."

"Well, why shouldn't you, if you believe in me? Of course I wasn't bom in my Birthplace, but I lived most of my boyhood in this house — or till I escaped to London, some say from the law, and some from the hopeless dullness of Stratford, though then there was no great outlook for me here with my wife and three children. Do my biographers say I brought Anne home here to live with me in this house? It would have been like my father to let me; he was a kind man and muddled away his money like many another kind man. He one© said of me, 'Will was a good, honest fellow, and he darest have cracked a jest with him at any time,' which has been a great comfort to the biographers as material and as inferential evidence that I wrote my plays. And my mother, my dear mother, would have been a loving mother-in-law to Anne, as mothers-in-law go. Or do the biographers prefer to conjecture that I went home with Anne to Shottery? Been to Shottery yet?"

"Not this time; but I'm going."

"Let me go with you. I think I can make some things clearer to you there. So you found his lordship at the Picture Theater?"

"Yes. I was rather surprised of his interest in the movies."

"But why? He would have told you in his Latin that he counted nothing human alien to him because he was human himself, and he especially likes all manner of new inventions. He would rather have invented your talking-movies, I believe, than written some of my plays, say" — and here Shakespeare smiled knowingly at me — "'Pericles of Tyre' or 'A Comedy of Errors.'"

I laughed with guilty consciousness, but I said, hardily, "He couldn't have written them."

"Well, I don't know," he returned, and then he laughed out. "/ didn't, you know — or not entirely. In my day we took our own whenever the other fellows left it; and those are not the only plays of mine which I didn't write entirely. Well, it was an understood thing; there was the raw material, and each of us worked it up after his own fancy."

"But I rather wonder," I said, "at Bacon's interest in those mechanical inventions, which are a good deal in the nature of mechanical toys. Now the discovery of a general principle, or the application of it to some useful end — "

"I suppose he thinks harmless amusement and painless instruction are useful ends to be reached by the movies. And as he never could write plays he may hope to supplant the written and acted drama with them. You know that in Italy they've already supplanted the Marionette drama."

"No!" I cried, and I felt a pang of the keenest regret. "Not the wriggling plays of the time-honored masks, operated by strings overhead and vocalized by many voices in one, squeaked and growled from behind — not Arlecchino, and Pantalone, and Brighella, and Facanapa and II Dottore, and Policinella, and the rest — "

''Swept by the board, all gone, before the devastating film. I was down in Venice, last night, at the little theater where you used to see them, and they were doing a Wild West movie piece just such as you saw to-day; and it's the same everywhere in Italy.”

I was dumb with grief, and he hastened to turn the subject a little. "But it's not only your application of mechanics to the drama which interests our friend. He's much more interested in your Pure Food movement. He doesn't at all sympathize, though, with the Anti-Cold Storage Crusade, which seems rather to have fallen through, by the by. He believes he discovered the principles of cold storage. You know he brought on his mortal sickness by leaving his coach on a very cold day and stopping at a farm-house to get a dressed hen which he stuffed with snow."

I said I thought I remembered.

"The experiment was perfectly successful. The hen was preserved till the snow thawed; but Bacon took cold from the exposure and died. He maintains that his experiment was the first embryonic stirring of your gigantic system of Cold Storage."