It agreeable to contemplate Mr. Bernard Shaw's recreations in tic
se strenuous days. They consist no longer in writing plays, but the much more absorbing diversion of counting the letter —individual characters, not epistles—in a page of The Ti" On a particular page on a particular day there were, it 'PP` .s, 54,369 letters. • So far as I am concerned the dictum %'11 0 unchallenged, for I assume that Mr. Shaw will have safeguarded himself by doing the count twice at least. If in an unexpectedly leisured moment I did decide to check his figure, and found that it should actually be 54,368, the implicit faith I have always placed in him would be permanently shattered. But there is more than this. Each of the advertise- ment pages contained 88,20o letters. (I have grave suspicions of these round numbers ; but let it pass.) Altogether a ten-page issue of The Times averages 712,845 letters. " And so? " you may ask. And so The Times, which commented with reverent satire on King George V's spelling, should take to simplified spelling itself, thereby saving the cost of writing, setting and printing 94,136,952 superfluous letters in the course of the year. But it won't be saved, and for good reason.
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake, —and write (with negligible variations) the tongue that Shakes- peare wrote. Not all Mr. Shaw's astronomical computations astronomically multiplied will persuade Englishmen or Scots (or even, I predict, his fellow-Irishmen) to spell enough enuf.
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