of fire and brimstone de luxe for married couples who had loved wisely and too well on a Christian holiday."
"Boldly stolen from Voltaire," suggested Bram.
"No, I read about the lake in one of Anatole France's weekly essays in 'Le Temps,' but there was no reference to Johnson, of course.
"Speaking of Voltaire—I don't remember that he mentioned Johnson in his English Letters, though he did take the trouble (in Eighteenth Century French ignorance) to call Shakespeare 'a drunken savage,' 'an amazing genius' and 'an indecent buffoon who had rendered English taste a ruined lady for two hundred years to come.'"
"Date's quite correct, as I once pointed out to poor Gene Field," interrupted Stoker. He called for a slate—they had no paper at the Cheese—and scrawled:
| "Opening of the Lyceum Theatre under Henry Irving and Bram Stoker | 1878 |
| Death of Shakespeare | 1616 |
| Interval | 262." |
"As you see," added Bram, "Voltaire was out only a little more than half a century. And what's half a century when the Oxford Dodo—if the moths hadn't eaten him—would now be seven and twenty trillions
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