Holmes, Sweet Holmes Mr. Martin Cooper's discovery, made public in
a letter to , the Spectator, that Sherlock Holmes never said " Elemen- tary, my dear Watson," produced a Fourth Leader in The Times, and that in its turn gave rise to some learned corres- pondence in that journal. So far no one has put forward what I feel sure is the true explanation of the phrase's wide- spread currency, which is that it was a line—possibly a curtain- line—in one or other of the dramatisations, probably that made and acted in by William Gillette. I haven't been able to check this, but—to cite a roughly similar case—I was once told, and long believed, that the most dramatic line in English literature was " Hand me my rattan, Watson ! ", uttered by Holmes when the snake in The Speckled Band began to descend the bell-rope. It was many years before I re-read the story, and found that the line does not occur in it. I bet it did occur in the play.
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