to draw such a "disgusting" picture of Juliet awaking at midnight in the vault,
"Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed;
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours of the night spirits resort:—
Alack, alack! is it not like that I,
So early waking—what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad—
Oh, if I wake, shall I not lie distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefathers' joints,
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?"
But there will be no indignant letters, because we have quoted this from the thousand-souled Shakespeare. And what about "Hamlet", with the stage strewn with dead bodies in the last act? And the ghost of "the blood-boltered Banquo" at Macbeth's banquet? And that gruesome scene where Macbeth washes his hands of the murdered Duncan's blood:
"What hands are these? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."
We fear Shakespeare would fare quite badly at the hands of some of our readers. And the gentle Poe, who is still America's favorite author, and growing in popularity year by year (although the man himself died poor and neglected seventy-five years ago)—how would Poe fare if he were writing today? Hardly better than he fared during his life. But the weird tales of that great master remain as a precious heritage to the whole world.
Considering the present unceasing popularity of the works of this great master of weird literature, we have no fear for the future of Weird Tales so long as the magazine remains weird.
And now a word as to the series of true tales of witchcraft by Seabury Quinn, which begins in the March issue under the title of "Servants of Satan". Mr. Quinn is familiar to the readers of Weird Tales as author of the series of "Weird Crimes", and also "The Phantom Farmhouse" and "Out of the Long Ago".
The first four stories deal with witchcraft in America; the first one, next month, being "The Salem Horror". These stories are an important contribution to American historical literature. Mr. Quinn does more than merely transmute the musty court records and transcripts of evidence into fascinating true narratives as gripping as any fiction: he takes the readers into the atmosphere and spirit of old Salem, and makes you know the historic figures of our superstitious New England forefathers as if you were there in person. This is high art. And Mr. Quinn's narratives are as unbiased as they are vivid.
"Most writers, commenting on the Salem delusion," Quinn writes in a letter to the editor, "are inclined to find excuses for it in the superstitious
