occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians. From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen. —Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don't you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it. His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air. HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT Pièce de Shakespeare He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown: —Pièce de Shakespeare, don't you know. It's so French. The French point of view. Hamlet ou... —The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended. John Eglinton laughed. —Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters. Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder. —A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne. Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar. Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we had spared... Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea. —He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr Best's behove. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep. List! List! O List! My flesh hears him: creeping, hears. If thou didst ever... —What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin