—­He is, Stephen said.  The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.  All in all.  In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold.  He acts and is acted on.  Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the real Carmen.  His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

—­Cuckoo!  Cuckoo!  Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly.  O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

—­And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed.  When all is said Dumas Fils (or is it Dumas Pere?) is right.  After God Shakespeare has created most.

—­Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said.  He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth.  Then dies.  The motion is ended.  Gravediggers bury Hamlet Pere and Hamlet Fils.  A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music.  And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced.  If you like the epilogue look long on it:  prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go.  Strong curtain.  He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.  Maeterlinck says:  If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep.  If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.  Every life is many days, day after day.  We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.  The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio BOIA, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

—­Eureka!  Buck Mulligan cried.  Eureka!

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton’s desk.

—­May I? he said.  The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

—­Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall live.  The rest shall keep as they are.