"BEATUS ILLE--"

Sometime toward the end of the Elizabethen Age, Anthony Munday presented a play for the approval of the National Board of Review, a position then held by Sir Edmund Tilney. Good Sir Edmund--whether from sheer spite or momentary indisposition, reporters were unable to ascertain--grasped his blue pencil with a shriek of rage, and by means of sparkling marginal notes commanded drastic revision. Four accomplished dramatists hurried to his assistance, bore away the torn and bleeding playlet and revamped it to a more conventional pattern. Fortunately for modern scholars, one of the attending surgeons left the results of his efforts in his own hand. Careful examination shows that the writing corresponds almost exactly to the signature at the end of the last will and testament of William Shakespeare. At last, apparently after almost four hundred years an authentic manuscript of the greatest figure in English literature has been discovered. And the whole affair may be due to nothing more serious than that Sir Edmund's cook forgot to do the eggs on both sides.

Now if it be true that history repeats itself, the people of Massachusetts builded far worse than they knew last year at the polls when they defeated moving picture censorship, not for themselves, but for their children's children. For with a board of censors, some great director might be rushed in at the last moment to correct the work of a loose-minded scenario writer. And so poring, five hundred years hence, over dusty celluloid strips, the student might come suddenly upon a treasure a bit of dialogue by Ince, or an art title in the hand of D. W. Griffith.