"How is that for low, laities and gentlenuns?"

(176.19-178.7)  So far, the dominant theme of the seventh chapter of Finnegans Wake has been Shem's lowness.  In today's reading, the narrator continues to expound upon that theme.  It's "notoriously known" that on Bloody Sunday, Shem "in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives."  He hid out in "his inkbattle house," where he moaned feebly with "his cheek and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked."  We're told that the general populace was against Shem.  He fled from the fighting "pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles."  Later, at a the mention of "the scaly rybald," a chorus of ladies would exclaim, "Poisse!" (which McHugh links to "poisson," the French word for "fish," and "poisse," the French word for "bad luck" or "ponce").

Shem, the narrator explains, thought as highly of himself as everyone else thought lowly of him.  The narrator points to one particular occasion in which Shem was (again) "drinking heavily of spirits" and talking to his "heavenlaid twin," Davy Browne-Nowlan (once again recalling Giordano Bruno, "the Nolan").  This time, Shem put himself on equal terms with Shakespeare ("shaggspick" or "Shakhisbeard").  And while he acknowledged his numerous attackers and detractors, Shem felt it was possible that he would "wipe alley english spooker [in a sense, every English speaker], multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse."  One can't help but compare Shem here to Joyce, who, in the face of numerous and various types of opposition, wiped the conventions of the English novel off of the face of the Earth.