IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY









CHAPTER I







Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished

manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary

of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found

which deal with "Claimants"--claimants historically notorious:

Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the Veiled Prophet of

Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare,

Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant--and

the rest of them.  Eminent Claimants, successful Claimants,

defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb Claimants, showy

Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants, despised Claimants,

twinkle starlike here and there and yonder through the mists of

history and legend and tradition--and oh, all the darling tribe are

clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep

interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous

resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to.  It has

always been so with the human race.  There was never a Claimant

that couldn't get a hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a

rapturous following, no matter how flimsy and apparently

unauthentic his claim might be.  Arthur Orton's claim that he was

the lost Tichborne baronet come to life again was as flimsy as Mrs.

Eddy's that she wrote Science and Health from the direct dictation

of the Deity; yet in England near forty years ago Orton had a huge

army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained

stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an

impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and to-day Mrs. Eddy's following

is not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and

enthusiasm.  Orton had many fine and educated minds among his

adherents, Mrs. Eddy has had the like among hers from the

beginning.  Her church is as well equipped in those particulars as

is any other church.  Claimants can always count upon a following,

it doesn't matter who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether

they come with documents or without.  It was always so.  Down out

of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you

listen you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for

Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.



A friend has sent me a new book, from England--The Shakespeare

Problem Restated--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty

years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is

excited once more.  It is an interest which was born of Delia

Bacon's book--away back in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856.

About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his

own steamboat to the Pennsylvania, and placed me under the orders

and instructions of George Ealer--dead now, these many, many years.

I steered for him a good many months--as was the humble duty of the

pilot-apprentice:  stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under

the severe superintendence and correction of the master.  He was a

prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare.  He would play

chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity

something to do that.  Also--quite uninvited--he would read

Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was

his watch, and I was steering.  He read well, but not profitably

for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text.

That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that

degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of

river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which

observations were Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's.  For

instance:





What man dare, _I_ dare!



Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of

an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off!

rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she goes!

meet her, meet her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if you

crowded it like that?  Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my

firm nerves she'll be in the WOODS the first you know! stop the

starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! .

. . NOW then, you're all right; come ahead on the starboard;

straighten up and go 'long, never tremble:  or be alive again, and

dare me to the desert damnation can't you keep away from that

greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded!

with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no,

only the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby

of a girl.  Hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's

asleep again, I reckon, go down and call Brown yourself, unreal

mockery, hence!"





He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy

and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since

been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way.  I cannot rid

it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with

their irrelevant "What in hell are you up to NOW! pull her down!

more! MORE!--there now, steady as you go," and the other

disorganizing interruptions that were always leaping from his

mouth.  When I read Shakespeare now, I can hear them as plainly as

I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one years ago.  I never

regarded Ealer's readings as educational.  Indeed they were a

detriment to me.



His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that

detail he was a good reader, I can say that much for him.  He did

not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as

well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.



Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi

pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book?  Yes.  And he said it; said it all

the time, for months--in the morning watch, the middle watch, the

dog watch; and probably kept it going in his sleep.  He bought the

literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed

it all through thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed

in every thirty-five days--the time required by that swift boat to

achieve two round trips.  We discussed, and discussed, and

discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he

did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and

there was a vacancy.  He did his arguing with heat, with energy,

with violence; and I did mine with the reserve and moderation of a

subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that

is perched forty feet above the water.  He was fiercely loyal to

Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the

pretensions of the Baconians.  So was I--at first.  And at first he

was glad that that was my attitude.  There were even indications

that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true, by the distance

that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly

one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a

compliment--compliment coming down from above the snow-line and not

well thawed in the transit, and not likely to set anything afire,

not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; still a detectable compliment,

and precious.



Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--if

possible--than I was before, and more prejudiced against Bacon--if

possible than I was before.  And so we discussed and discussed,

both on the same side, and were happy.  For a while.  Only for a

while.  Only for a very little while, a very, very, very little

while.  Then the atmosphere began to change; began to cool off.



A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier

than I did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all practical

purposes.  You see, he was of an argumentative disposition.

Therefore it took him but a little time to get tired of arguing

with a person who agreed with everything he said and consequently

never furnished him a provocative to flare up and show what he

could do when it came to clear, cold, hard, rose-cut, hundred-

faceted, diamond-flashing reasoning.  That was his name for it.  It

has been applied since, with complacency, as many as several times,

in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle.  On the Shakespeare side.



Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to

me when principle and personal interest found themselves in

opposition to each other and a choice had to be made:  I let

principle go, and went over to the other side.  Not the entire way,

but far enough to answer the requirements of the case.  That is to

say, I took this attitude, to wit:  I only BELIEVED Bacon wrote

Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare didn't.  Ealer was

satisfied with that, and the war broke loose.  Study, practice,

experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to

take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly

seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly;

finally:  fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was

welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I

looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody

else's faith that didn't tally with mine.  That faith, imposed upon

me by self-interest in that ancient day, remains my faith to-day,

and in it I find comfort, solace, peace, and never-failing joy.

You see how curiously theological it is.  The "rice Christian" of

the Orient goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice

and the missionary is after HIM; he goes for rice, and remains to

worship.



Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially all of

it.  The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that

large name.  We others do not call our inductions and deductions

and reductions by any name at all.  They show for themselves, what

they are, and we can with tranquil confidence leave the world to

ennoble them with a title of its own choosing.



Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my

induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself:

always getting eight feet, eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes

even quarter-less-twain--as _I_ believed; but always "no bottom,"

as HE said.



I got the best of him only once.  I prepared myself.  I wrote out a

passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted a

while ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with his wild

steamboatful interlardings.  When an unrisky opportunity offered,

one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled

patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard again

and he had sneaked the Pennsylvania triumphantly through it without

once scraping sand, and the A. T. Lacey had followed in our wake

and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I showed it to him.  It

amused him.  I asked him to fire it off:  read it; read it, I

diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry.  The

compliment touched him where he lived.  He did read it; read it

with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read

again; for HE knew how to put the right music into those thunderous

interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them

sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul, each

one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without

damage to the massed and magnificent whole.



I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited

until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet

position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one

which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon, to wit:

that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's works, for the

reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with

the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk,

and lawyer-ways--and if Shakespeare was possessed of the

infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, how

did he get it, and WHERE, and WHEN?



"From books."



From books!  That was always the idea.  I answered as my readings

of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me

to answer:  that a man can't handle glibly and easily and

comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has

not personally served.  He will make mistakes; he will not, and

cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and

the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form,

the reader who has served that trade will know the writer HASN'T.

Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn how to

correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-masonries of

any trade by careful reading and studying.  But when I got him to

read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings, he

perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a student a

bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly

that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and

make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover.  It

was a triumph for me.  He was silent awhile, and I knew what was

happening:  he was losing his temper.  And I knew he would

presently close the session with the same old argument that was

always his stay and his support in time of need; the same old

argument, the one I couldn't answer--because I dasn't:  the

argument that I was an ass, and better shut up.  He delivered it,

and I obeyed.



Oh, dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago!  And here

am I, old, forsaken, forlorn and alone, arranging to get that

argument out of somebody again.



When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying

that he keeps company with other standard authors.  Ealer always

had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the

same ones over and over again, and did not care to change to newer

and fresher ones.  He played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed

hearing himself play.  So did I.  He had a notion that a flute

would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not

standing a watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest,

disjointed, on the compass-shelf under the breast-board.  When the

Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with

wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among them),

pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never

knew what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt.  He and his pilot-

house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank

through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and the boiler

deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on

top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog

of scalding and deadly steam.  But not for long.  He did not lose

his head:  long familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it,

in any and all emergencies.  He held his coat-lappels to his nose

with one hand, to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the

other till he found the joints of his flute, then he is took

measures to save himself alive, and was successful.  I was not on

board.  I had been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain

Klinefelter.  The reason--however, I have told all about it in the

book called Old Times on the Mississippi, and it isn't important

anyway, it is so long ago.







CHAPTER II







When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years

ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I

could about him.  I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher,

Mr. Barclay the stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it

seemed to me.  I was anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts

to serious subjects when there wasn't another boy in the village

who could be hired to do such a thing.  I was greatly interested in

the incident of Eve and the serpent, and thought Eve's calmness was

perfectly noble.  I asked Mr. Barclay if he had ever heard of

another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse

herself and break for the nearest timber.  He did not answer my

question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age

and comprehension.  I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing

to tell me the facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there:  he

wouldn't allow any discussion of them.



In the course of time we exhausted the facts.  There were only five

or six of them, you could set them all down on a visiting-card.  I

was disappointed.  I had been meditating a biography, and was

grieved to find that there were no materials.  I said as much, with

the tears running down.  Mr. Barclay's sympathy and compassion were

aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he

patted me on the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole

vast ocean of materials!  I can still feel the happy thrill which

these blessed words shot through me.



Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement

and joy.  Like this:  it was "conjectured"--though not established-

-that Satan was originally an angel in heaven; that he fell; that

he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was defeated, and

banished to perdition.  Also, "we have reason to believe" that

later he did so-and-so; that "we are warranted in supposing" that

at a subsequent time he travelled extensively, seeking whom he

might devour; that a couple of centuries afterward, "as tradition

instructs us," he took up the cruel trade of tempting people to

their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by-and-by, "as the

probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done certain things,

he might have done certain other things, he must have done still

other things.



And so on and so on.  We set down the five known facts by

themselves, on a piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on

fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the

"conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes," and "perhapses,"

and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and "guesses," and

"probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted to

thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might have

beens," and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and

"unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubts"--and behold!



MATERIALS?  Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!



Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the

history of Satan.  Why?  Because, as he said, he had suspicions;

suspicions that my attitude in this matter was not reverent; and

that a person must be reverent when writing about the sacred

characters.  He said any one who spoke flippantly of Satan would be

frowned upon by the religious world and also be brought to account.



I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly

misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan,

and that my reverence for him equalled, and possibly even exceeded,

that of any member of any church.  I said it wounded me deeply to

perceive by his words that he thought I would make fun of Satan,

and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at him:  whereas in truth I had

never thought of such a thing, but had only a warm desire to make

fun of those others and laugh at THEM.  "What others?"  "Why, the

Supposers, the Perhapsers, the Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-

Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters,

the We-are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and all that funny crop of

solemn architects who have taken a good solid foundation of five

indisputable and unimportant facts and built upon it a Conjectural

Satan thirty miles high."



What did Mr. Barclay do then?  Was he disarmed?  Was he silenced?

No.  He was shocked.  He was so shocked that he visibly shuddered.

He said the Satanic Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers

were THEMSELVES sacred!  As sacred as their work.  So sacred that

whoso ventured to mock them or make fun of their work, could not

afterward enter any respectable house, even by the back door.



How true were his words, and how wise!  How fortunate it would have

been for me if I had heeded them.  But I was young, I was but seven

years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract attention.

I wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house

since.







CHAPTER III







How curious and interesting is the parallel--as far as poverty of

biographical details is concerned--between Satan and Shakespeare.

It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is

nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance,

nothing approaching it even in tradition.  How sublime is their

position, and how over-topping, how sky-reaching, how supreme--the

two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities!  They

are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon

the planet.



For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now, of

those details of Shakespeare's history which are FACTS--verified

facts, established facts, undisputed facts.





FACTS





He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.



Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write,

could not sign their names.



At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby

and unclean, and densely illiterate.  Of the nineteen important men

charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to "make

their mark" in attesting important documents, because they could

not write their names.



Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known.  They are

a blank.



On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a

license to marry Anne Whateley.



Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne

Hathaway.  She was eight years his senior.



William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.  In a hurry.  By grace

of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication

of the banns.



Within six months the first child was born.



About two (blank) years followed, during which period NOTHING AT

ALL HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.



Then came twins--1585.  February.



Two blank years follow.



Then--1587--he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family

behind.



Five blank years follow.  During this period NOTHING HAPPENED TO

HIM, as far as anybody actually knows.



Then--1592--there is mention of him as an actor.



Next year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.



Next year--1594--he played before the queen.  A detail of no

consequence:  other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five

of her reign.  And remained obscure.



Three pretty full years follow.  Full of play-acting.  Then



In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.



Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he

accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.



Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become

associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly)

author of the same.



Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made

no protest.  Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled

down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading

in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one

shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his

family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself

for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor

who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and

did not succeed.



He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these elevated

pursuits.  Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages

with his name.



A thoroughgoing business man's will.  It named in minute detail

every item of property he owned in the world--houses, lands, sword,

silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to his "second-best

bed" and its furniture.



It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the

members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even

his wife:  the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by

urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the

wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who had

had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender

was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at

last with the money still lacking.  No, even this wife was

remembered in Shakespeare's will.



He left her that "second-best bed."



And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky

widowhood with.



It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a

poet's.



It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.



Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and

second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned

one he gave it a high place in his will.



The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED

LITERARY WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.



Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that

has died THIS poor; the others all left literary remains behind.

Also a book.  Maybe two.



If Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we need not go into that:  we

know he would have mentioned it in his will.  If a good dog,

Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have

got a dower interest in it.  I wish he had had a dog, just so we

could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among

the family, in his careful business way.



He signed the will in three places.



In earlier years he signed two other official documents.



These five signatures still exist.



There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE.  Not a

line.



Was he prejudiced against the art?  His granddaughter, whom he

loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no

teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was

rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't

tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it

was Shakespeare's.



When Shakespeare died in Stratford IT WAS NOT AN EVENT.  It made no

more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-

actor would have made.  Nobody came down from London; there were no

lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears--there was merely

silence, and nothing more.  A striking contrast with what happened

when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and

the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed

from life!  No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of

Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before he lifted his.



SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of

Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.



SO FAR AS ANYBODY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, he never wrote a letter to

anybody in his life.



SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS

LIFE.



So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of Stratford

wrote only one poem during his life.  This one is authentic.  He

did write that one--a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the

whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head.  He

commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he

was obeyed.  There it abides to this day.  This is it:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





In the list as above set down, will be found EVERY POSITIVELY KNOWN

fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meagre as the invoice is.

Beyond these details we know NOT A THING about him.  All the rest

of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up,

course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures--

an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat

and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.







CHAPTER IV







CONJECTURES





The historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free School

in Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was

thirteen.  There is no EVIDENCE in existence that he ever went to

school at all.



The historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school--the

school which they "suppose" he attended.



They "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it necessary

for him to leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to

work and help support his parents and their ten children.  But

there is no evidence that he ever entered or retired from the

school they suppose he attended.



They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering business;

and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown

butchering, but only slaughtered calves.  Also, that whenever he

killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it.  This

supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't there at

the time; a man who got it from a man who could have been there,

but did not say whether he was or not; and neither of them thought

to mention it for decades, and decades, and decades, and two more

decades after Shakespeare's death (until old age and mental decay

had refreshed and vivified their memories).  They hadn't two facts

in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only just

the one:  he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was

at it.  Curious.  They had only one fact, yet the distinguished

citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little town--just half

his lifetime.  However, rightly viewed, it was the most important

fact, indeed almost the only important fact, of Shakespeare's life

in Stratford.  Rightly viewed.  For experience is an author's most

valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and

the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.  Rightly

viewed, calf-butchering accounts for Titus Andronicus, the only

play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and yet

it is the only one everybody tries to chouse him out of, the

Baconians included.



The historians find themselves "justified in believing" that the

young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and

got haled before that magistrate for it.  But there is no shred of

respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.



The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have happened

into the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in turning Sir

Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow.  They have long ago convinced

the world--on surmise and without trustworthy evidence--that

Shallow IS Sir Thomas.



The next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford history

comes easy.  The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-

stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the

surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play:

result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh SUCH a

wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for

all time!  It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the

colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and

sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and

admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on

the planet.  We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of

plaster of paris.  We ran short of plaster of paris, or we'd have

built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford

Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or

contained the most plaster.



Shakespeare pronounced Venus and Adonis "the first heir of his

invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at

literary composition.  He should not have said it.  It has been an

embarrassment to his historians these many, many years.  They have

to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and

beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family--

1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along there; because within the

next five years he wrote five great plays, and could not have found

time to write another line.



It is sorely embarrassing.  If he began to slaughter calves, and

poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest

likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched

from that school where he was supposably storing up Latin for

future literary use--he had his youthful hands full, and much more

than full.  He must have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect,

which wouldn't be understood in London, and study English very

hard.  Very hard indeed; incredibly hard, almost, if the result of

that labor was to be the smooth and rounded and flexible and

letter-perfect English of the Venus and Adonis in the space of ten

years; and at the same time learn great and fine and unsurpassable

literary form.



However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this and

more, much more:  learned law and its intricacies; and the complex

procedure of the law courts; and all about soldiering, and

sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal courts and

aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his one head

every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and every kind

of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and

added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge of the world's

great literatures, ancient and modern, than was possessed by any

other man of his time--for he was going to make brilliant and easy

and admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the

moment he got to London.  And according to the surmisers, that is

what he did.  Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to

teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig

them out of.  His father could not read, and even the surmisers

surmise that he did not keep a library.



It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got

his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate

acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers

through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT; just as a

bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the

Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Behring

Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of

that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a

"trot-line" Sundays.  But the surmise is damaged by the fact that

there is no evidence--and not even tradition--that the young

Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law court.



It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his

law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through

"amusing himself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking

up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-

courts and listening.  But it is only surmise; there is no EVIDENCE

that he ever did either of those things.  They are merely a couple

of chunks of plaster of paris.



There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding

horses in front of the London theatres, mornings and afternoons.

Maybe he did.  If he did, it seriously shortened his law-study

hours and his recreation-time in the courts.  In those very days he

was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get.  The

horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably

increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young

Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk

by hunk and chunk by chunk every day in those strenuous times, and

emptying each day's catch into next day's imperishable drama.



He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a

knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and

talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages:

for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various

knowledges, too, into his dramas.  How did he acquire these rich

assets?



In the usual way:  by surmise.  It is SURMISED that he travelled in

Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself to put their

scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he perfected himself in

French, Italian and Spanish on the road; that he went in

Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as soldier or sutler

or something, for several months or years--or whatever length of

time a surmiser needs in his business--and thus became familiar

with soldiership and soldier-ways and soldier-talk, and generalship

and general-ways and general-talk, and seamanship and sailor-ways

and sailor-talk.



Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who held

the horses in the meantime; and who studied the books in the

garret; and who frollicked in the law-courts for recreation.  Also,

who did the call-boying and the play-acting.



For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a

"vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in

'94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that

(in those days) lightly-valued and not much respected profession.



Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theatres, and

manager of them.  Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing

business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty

years.  Then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his

one poem--his only poem, his darling--and laid him down and died:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





He was probably dead when he wrote it.  Still, this is only

conjecture.  We have only circumstantial evidence.  Internal

evidence.



Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the

giant Biography of William Shakespeare?  It would strain the

Unabridged Dictionary to hold them.  He is a Brontosaur:  nine

bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris.







CHAPTER V







"We May Assume"



In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are

transacting business.  Two of these cults are known as the

Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the

Brontosaurian.



The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works;

the Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian

doesn't really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly

and contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN'T, and strongly suspects

that Bacon DID.  We all have to do a good deal of assuming, but I

am fairly certain that in every case I can call to mind the

Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the Shakespearites.  Both

parties handle the same materials, but the Baconians seem to me to

get much more reasonable and rational and persuasive results out of

them than is the case with the Shakespearites.  The Shakespearite

conducts his assuming upon a definite principle, an unchanging and

immutable law--which is:  2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together,

make 165.  I believe this to be an error.  No matter, you cannot

get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon

any other basis.  With the Baconian it is different.  If you place

before him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will

never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases

out of ten he will get just the proper 31.



Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way

calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and

unintelligent.  We will suppose a case:  take a lap-bred, house-

fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's

scarred from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous

experience, and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite

that one may say of him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; also,

take a mouse.  Lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless

prison-cell.  Wait half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a

Shakespearite and a Baconian, and let them cipher and assume.  The

mouse is missing:  the question to be decided is, where is it?  You

can guess both verdicts beforehand.  One verdict will say the

kitten contains the mouse; the other will as certainly say the

mouse is in the tomcat.



The Shakespearite will Reason like this--(that is not my word, it

is his).  He will say the kitten MAY HAVE BEEN attending school

when nobody was noticing; therefore WE ARE WARRANTED IN ASSUMING

that it did so; also, it COULD HAVE BEEN training in a court-

clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could have

happened, WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN ASSUMING that it did happen; it COULD

HAVE STUDIED CATOLOGY IN A GARRET when no one was noticing--

therefore it DID; it COULD HAVE attended cat-assizes on the shed-

roof nights, for recreation, when no one was noticing, and

harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat lawyer-talk in

that way:  it COULD have done it, therefore without a doubt it did;

it could have gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one was

noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to

do with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain inference,

therefore is, that that is what it DID.  Since all these manifold

things COULD have occurred, we have EVERY RIGHT TO BELIEVE they did

occur.  These patiently and painstakingly accumulated vast

acquirements and competences needed but one thing more--

opportunity--to convert themselves into triumphant action.  The

opportunity came, we have the result; BEYOND SHADOW OF QUESTION the

mouse is in the kitten.



It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a "WE

THINK WE MAY ASSUME," we expect it, under careful watering and

fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy and

weather-defying "THERE ISN'T A SHADOW OF A DOUBT" at last--and it

usually happens.



We know what the Baconian's verdict would be:  "THERE IS NOT A RAG

OF EVIDENCE THAT THE KITTEN HAS HAD ANY TRAINING, ANY EDUCATION,

ANY EXPERIENCE QUALIFYING IT FOR THE PRESENT OCCASION, OR IS INDEED

EQUIPPED FOR ANY ACHIEVEMENT ABOVE LIFTING SUCH UNCLAIMED MILK AS

COMES ITS WAY; BUT THERE IS ABUNDANT EVIDENCE--UNASSAILABLE PROOF,

IN FACT--THAT THE OTHER ANIMAL IS EQUIPPED, TO THE LAST DETAIL,

WITH EVERY QUALIFICATION NECESSARY FOR THE EVENT.  WITHOUT SHADOW

OF DOUBT THE TOMCAT CONTAINS THE MOUSE."







CHAPTER VI







When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions

attributed to him as author had been before the London world and in

high favor for twenty-four years.  Yet his death was not an event.

It made no stir, it attracted no attention.  Apparently his eminent

literary contemporaries did not realize that a celebrated poet had

passed from their midst.  Perhaps they knew a play-actor of minor

rank had disappeared, but did not regard him as the author of his

Works.  "We are justified in assuming" this.



His death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford.

Does this mean that in Stratford he was not regarded as a celebrity

of ANY kind?



"We are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed OBLIGED to assume-

-that such was the case.  He had spent the first twenty-two or

twenty-three years of his life there, and of course knew everybody

and was known by everybody of that day in the town, including the

dogs and the cats and the horses.  He had spent the last five or

six years of his life there, diligently trading in every big and

little thing that had money in it; so we are compelled to assume

that many of the folk there in those said latter days knew him

personally, and the rest by sight and hearsay.  But not as a

CELEBRITY?  Apparently not.  For everybody soon forgot to remember

any contact with him or any incident connected with him.  The

dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known

about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the

same unremembering condition:  if they knew of any incident

connected with that period of his life they didn't tell about it.

Would they if they had been asked?  It is most likely.  Were they

asked?  It is pretty apparent that they were not.  Why weren't

they?  It is a very plausible guess that nobody there or elsewhere

was interested to know.



For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been

interested in him.  Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson

awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and

put it in the front of the book.  Then silence fell AGAIN.



For sixty years.  Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford life

began to be made, of Stratfordians.  Of Stratfordians who had known

Shakespeare or had seen him?  No.  Then of Stratfordians who had

seen people who had known or seen people who had seen Shakespeare?

No.  Apparently the inquiries were only made of Stratfordians who

were not Stratfordians of Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and

what they had learned had come to them from persons who had not

seen Shakespeare; and what they had learned was not claimed as

FACT, but only as legend--dim and fading and indefinite legend;

legend of the calf-slaughtering rank, and not worth remembering

either as history or fiction.



Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who

had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where

he was born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and

leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly

voiceless, utterly gossipless?  And permanently so?  I don't

believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's.  And

couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been

regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.



When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will

not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite

likely to result, most likely to result, indeed substantially SURE

to result in the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the

human race.  Like me.



My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the

banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old.  I

entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to

another in the village during nine and a half years.  Then my

father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened

circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill

forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and clothes,

and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place of them.

This for summer wear, probably.  I lived in Hannibal fifteen and a

half years, altogether, then ran away, according to the custom of

persons who are intending to become celebrated.  I never lived

there afterward.  Four years later I became a "cub" on a

Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and

after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the U. S.

inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings

and decided that I knew every inch of the Mississippi--thirteen

hundred miles--in the dark and in the day--as well as a baby knows

the way to its mother's paps day or night.  So they licensed me as

a pilot--knighted me, so to speak--and I rose up clothed with

authority, a responsible servant of the United States government.



Now then.  Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two.  He had

lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about that.  He

died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books).

Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it;

and for sixty years afterward no townsman remembered to say

anything about him or about his life in Stratford.  When the

inquirer came at last he got but one fact--no, LEGEND--and got that

one at second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor,

and didn't claim copyright in it as a production of his own.  He

couldn't, very well, for its date antedated his own birth-date.

But necessarily a number of persons were still alive in Stratford

who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every

day in the last five years of his life, and they would have been

able to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he

had in those last days been a celebrity and therefore a person of

interest to the villagers.  Why did not the inquirer hunt them up

and interview them?  Wasn't it worth while?  Wasn't the matter of

sufficient consequence?  Had the inquirer an engagement to see a

dog-fight and couldn't spare the time?



It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity,

there or elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and

manager.



Now then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year being

already well behind me--yet SIXTEEN of my Hannibal schoolmates are

still alive to-day, and can tell--and do tell--inquirers dozens and

dozens of incidents of their young lives and mine together; things

that happened to us in the morning of life, in the blossom of our

youth, in the good days, the dear days, "the days when we went

gipsying, a long time ago."  Most of them creditable to me, too.

One child to whom I paid court when she was five years old and I

eight still lives in Hannibal, and she visited me last summer,

traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred miles of railroad

without damage to her patience or to her old-young vigor.  Another

little lassie to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when she was

nine years old and I the same, is still alive--in London--and hale

and hearty, just as I am.  And on the few surviving steamboats--

those lingering ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied

the big river in the beginning of my water-career--which is exactly

as long ago as the whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare

number--there are still findable two or three river-pilots who saw

me do creditable things in those ancient days; and several white-

headed engineers; and several roustabouts and mates; and several

deck-hands who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the

still night air the "six--feet--SCANT!" that made me shudder, and

the "M-a-r-k--twain!" that took the shudder away, and presently the

darling "By the d-e-e-p--four!" that lifted me to heaven for joy.

{1}  They know about me, and can tell.  And so do printers, from

St. Louis to New York; and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada

to San Francisco.  And so do the police.  If Shakespeare had really

been celebrated, like me, Stratford could have told things about

him; and if my experience goes for anything, they'd have done it.







CHAPTER VII







If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide

whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe I would

place before the debaters only the one question, WAS SHAKESPEARE

EVER A PRACTICING LAWYER? and leave everything else out.



It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely

myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished:  that he not only knew

some thousands of things about human life in all its shades and

grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and crafts and

professions which men busy themselves in, but that he could TALK

about the men and their grades and trades accurately, making no

mistakes.  Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken, or is it

only Tom, Dick, and Harry?  Does the exhibit stand upon wide, and

loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is not evidence, and not

proof--or upon details, particulars, statistics, illustrations,

demonstrations?



Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified definitely as

to only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-equipments, so far

as my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk abide with me--his

law-equipment.  I do not remember that Wellington or Napoleon ever

examined Shakespeare's battles and sieges and strategies, and then

decided and established for good and all, that they were militarily

flawless; I do not remember that any Nelson, or Drake or Cook ever

examined his seamanship and said it showed profound and accurate

familiarity with that art; I don't remember that any king or prince

or duke has ever testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in

his handling of royal court-manners and the talk and manners of

aristocracies; I don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or

Grecian or Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a

past-master in those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't

remember that there is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing

testimony--unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of

Shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law.



Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back

with certainty the changes that various trades and their processes

and technicalities have undergone in the long stretch of a century

or two and find out what their processes and technicalities were in

those early days, but with the law it is different:  it is mile-

stoned and documented all the way back, and the master of that

wonderful trade, that complex and intricate trade, that awe-

compelling trade, has competent ways of knowing whether

Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether his law-court

procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal shop-talk is the

shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a machine-made

counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional

loiterings in Westminster.



Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every

experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of

our day.  His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the sure touch

and the ease and confidence of a person who has LIVED what he is

talking about, not gathered it from books and random listenings.

Hear him:





Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each

sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the

whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity

possible everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor

tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under headway.





Again:





The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and sky-sails

set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all

were aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards and booms,

reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain

piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas, her sails

looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black speck.





Once more.  A race in the Pacific:





Our antagonist was in her best trim.  Being clear of the point, the

breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under our sails, but

we would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the

rigging of the California; then they were all furled at once, but

with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the top-gallant mast-heads

and loose them again at the word.  It was my duty to furl the fore-

royal; and while standing by to loose it again, I had a fine view

of the scene.  From where I stood, the two vessels seemed nothing

but spars and sails, while their narrow decks, far below, slanting

over by the force of the wind aloft, appeared hardly capable of

supporting the great fabrics raised upon them.  The California was

to windward of us, and had every advantage; yet, while the breeze

was stiff we held our own.  As soon as it began to slacken she

ranged a little ahead, and the order was given to loose the royals.

In an instant the gaskets were off and the bunt dropped.  "Sheet

home the fore-royal!"--"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's

home!"--"Hoist away, sir!" is bawled from aloft.  "Overhaul your

clewlines!" shouts the mate.  "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut

leech! belay!  Well the lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the

royals are set.





What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to

that?  He would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his

trade out of a book, he has BEEN there!"  But would this same

captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's

seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that

have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost to

history in the last three hundred years?  It is my conviction that

Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.  For instance--

from The Tempest:





Master.  Boatswain!



Boatswain.  Here, master; what cheer?



Master.  Good, speak to the mariners:  fall to't, yarely, or we run

ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!



(Enter mariners.)



Boatswain.  Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare,

yare!  Take in the topsail.  Tend to the master's whistle . . .

Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower!  Bring her to try wi'

the main course . . . Lay her a-hold, a-hold!  Set her two courses.

Off to sea again; lay her off.





That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a

change.



If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters

say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and

the imposing stone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the

frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it," I

should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing, and would know

that the writer was only a printer theoretically, not practically.



I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard

life; I know all the palaver of that business:  I know all about

discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all about

lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts,

inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings,

granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and

how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how

to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the

retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally I know

how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less

robust to do, and find it.  I know the argot of the quartz-mining

and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte

introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his

miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got

the phrasing by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford

one--not by experience.  No one can talk the quartz dialect

correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and

fuse.



I have been a surface-miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries,

and the dialect that belongs with them; and whenever Harte

introduces that industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his

characters that neither he nor they have ever served that trade.



I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in

any but one little spot in the world, so far as I know.  I know

how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace

it step by step and stage by stage up the mountain to its source,

and find the compact little nest of yellow metal reposing in its

secret home under the ground.  I know the language of that trade,

that capricious trade, that fascinating buried-treasure trade, and

can catch any writer who tries to use it without having learned it

by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands.



I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them; and

whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them

without having learned it at its source I can trap him always

before he gets far on his road.



And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to

superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the

matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the

previous controversies have informed me, concerning which

illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:

WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply

read and of limitless experience?  I would put aside the guesses,

and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have

beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are justified-in-presumings, and

the rest of those vague spectres and shadows and indefinitenesses,

and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict rendered by the jury

upon that single question.  If the verdict was Yes, I should feel

quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor, manager,

and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even

village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen

and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him,

did not write the Works.



Chapter XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Restated bears the heading

"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert

testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine,

as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle

the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the

Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.







CHAPTER VIII







Shakespeare as a Lawyer {2}



The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their

author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law,

but that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of

members of the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.



"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as

to the laws of marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to

Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be

demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."  Such was the

testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers of the

nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of Lord Chief

Justice in 1850, and subsequently became Lord Chancellor.  Its

weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by lawyers than by

laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is for those who

have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid displaying

their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and to

discuss legal doctrines.  "There is nothing so dangerous," wrote

Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to tamper with our

freemasonry."  A layman is certain to betray himself by using some

expression which a lawyer would never employ.  Mr. Sidney Lee

himself supplies us with an example of this.  He writes (p. 164):

"On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare . . . obtained judgment from a

jury against Addenbroke for the payment of No. 6, and No. 1. 5s.

0d. costs."  Now a lawyer would never have spoken of obtaining

"judgment from a jury," for it is the function of a jury not to

deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but to

find a verdict on the facts.  The error is, indeed, a venial one,

but it is just one of those little things which at once enable a

lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft."



But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he

is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence.  "Let a

non-professional man, however acute," writes Lord Campbell again,

"presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science

in discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into

laughable absurdity."



And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare?  He

had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy

familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in English

jurisprudence."  And again:  "Whenever he indulges this propensity

he uniformly lays down good law."  Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says:

"If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not

see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law

while writing it."  Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke speak of "the

marvelous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent

adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical

knowledge of their form and force."  Malone, himself a lawyer,

wrote:  "His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might

be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending

mind; it has the appearance of technical skill."  Another lawyer

and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says:  "No

dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son

of a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns

of Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with

Shakespeare's readiness and exactness.  And the significance of

this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the language

of the law that he exhibits this inclination.  The phrases peculiar

to other occupations serve him on rare occasions by way of

description, comparison or illustration, generally when something

in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as

part of his vocabulary, and parcel of his thought.  Take the word

'purchase' for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire

by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining

property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar

sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four

plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of

Beaumont and Fletcher.  It has been suggested that it was in

attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal

vocabulary.  But this supposition not only fails to account for

Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that

phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning

those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not such

as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at nisi prius, but

such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, 'fine and

recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,' 'indenture,' 'tenure,'

'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' 'remainder,'

'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc.  This conveyancer's jargon could

not have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in

London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title

of real property were comparatively rare.  And beside, Shakespeare

uses his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his

first London years, as in those produced at a later period.  Just

as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these

terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief

Justice and a Lord Chancellor."



Senator Davis wrote:  "We seem to have something more than a

sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar

art.  No legal solecisms will be found.  The abstrusest elements of

the common law are impressed into a disciplined service.  Over and

over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned

in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it.  In

the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its

entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers and double

vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method of bringing

writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules of pleading,

the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the principles of

evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the distinction

between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of

attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marriage, in

the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of

prerogative, in the inalienable character of the Crown, this

mastership appears with surprising authority."



To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have not

cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times,

viz.:  Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. created a Baron of the

Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-Ordinary and Judge

of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and better known to

the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869.

Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and as the late Mr. Inderwick,

K.C., has testified, was one of the first legal authorities of his

day, famous for his "remarkable grasp of legal principles," and

"endowed by nature with a remarkable facility for marshalling

facts, and for a clear expression of his views."



Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity with not

only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of

English law, a knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never

incorrect and never at fault . . . The mode in which this knowledge

was pressed into service on all occasions to express his meaning

and illustrate his thoughts, was quite unexampled.  He seems to

have had a special pleasure in his complete and ready mastership of

it in all its branches.  As manifested in the plays, this legal

knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which

places it on a wholly different footing from the rest of the

multifarious knowledge which is exhibited in page after page of the

plays.  At every turn and point at which the author required a

metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to

the law.  He seems almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the

commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in

description or illustration.  That he should have descanted in

lawyer language when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as

Shylock's bond, was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in

'Shakespeare' was exhibited in a far different manner:  it

protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or inappropriate,

and mingled itself with strains of thought widely divergent from

forensic subjects."  Again:  "To acquire a perfect familiarity with

legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical

terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's office but of the

pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of

employment in some career involving constant contact with legal

questions and general legal work would be requisite.  But a

continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was

just what the manager of two theatres had not at his disposal.  In

what portion of Shakespeare's (i.e. Shakspere's) career would it be

possible to point out that time could be found for the

interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of

practising lawyers?"



Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible

explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have

made the suggestion that Shakespeare might, conceivably, have been

a clerk in an attorney's office before he came to London.  Mr.

Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his opinion as to the

probability of this being true.  His answer was as follows:  "You

require us to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if true,

positive and irrefragable evidence in his own handwriting might

have been forthcoming to establish it.  Not having been actually

enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at

Stratford nor of the superior Courts at Westminster would present

his name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it

might reasonably have been expected that there would be deeds or

wills witnessed by him still extant, and after a very diligent

search none such can be discovered."



Upon this Lord Penzance comments:  "It cannot be doubted that Lord

Campbell was right in this.  No young man could have been at work

in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to

act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work

and name."  There is not a single fact or incident in all that is

known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports

this notion of a clerkship.  And after much argument and surmise

which has been indulged in on this subject, we may, I think, safely

put the notion on one side, for no less an authority than Mr. Grant

White says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an

attorney has been "blown to pieces."



It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he,

nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth.  "That Shakespeare was in

early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office, may be

correct.  At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of Record

sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, beside the town clerk,

belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining probability to

suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had employment in one

of them.  There is, it is true, no tradition to this effect, but

such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's occupation between

the time of leaving school and going to London are so loose and

baseless that no confidence can be placed in them.  It is, to say

the least, more probable that he was in an attorney's office than

that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high style,' and making

speeches over them."



This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument.  There is, as

we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's

apprentice.  John Dowdall, who made a tour in Warwickshire in 1693,

testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over

the church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by Mr.

Halliwell-Phillipps.  (Vol I, p. 11, and see Vol. II, p. 71, 72.)

Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported

by Aubrey, who must have written his account some time before 1680,

when his manuscript was completed.  Of the attorney's clerk

hypothesis, on the other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of

a tradition.  It has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations

of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the

Stratford rustic's marvellous acquaintance with law and legal terms

and legal life.  But Mr. Churton Collins has not the least

hesitation in throwing over the tradition which has the warrant of

antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous invention,

for which not only is there no shred of positive evidence, but

which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance point out, is really put

out of court by the negative evidence, since "no young man could

have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon

continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving

traces of his work and name."  And as Mr. Edwards further points

out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published (between

forty and fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing

of other legal papers, dated during the period of William

Shakespeare's youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires,

and not one signature of the young man has been found."



Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's

office it is clear that he must have so served for a considerable

period in order to have gained (if indeed it is credible that he

could have so gained) his remarkable knowledge of law.  Can we then

for a moment believe that, if this had been so, tradition would

have been absolutely silent on the matter?  That Dowdall's old

clerk, over eighty years of age, should have never heard of it

(though he was sure enough about the butcher's apprentice), and

that all the other ancient witnesses should be in similar

ignorance!



But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy.  Tradition is

to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as

irrefragable truth when it suits the case.  Shakespeare of

Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, but the author of

the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher's apprentice.

Away, therefore, with tradition.  But the author of the Plays and

Poems must have had a very large and a very accurate knowledge of

the law.  Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must have been an

attorney's clerk!  The method is simplicity itself.  By similar

reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a

soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things

beside, according to the inclination and the exigencies of the

commentator.  It would not be in the least surprising to find that

he was studying Latin as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's

office at the same time.



However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has

fully recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that

Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training.  "It may, of

course, be urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of

medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to

morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has ever

contended that he was a physician.  (Here Mr. Collins is wrong;

that contention also has been put forward.)  It may be urged that

his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and

callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also

extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a sailor

or a soldier.  (Wrong again.  Why even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse

'suspect' that he was a soldier!)  This may be conceded, but the

concession hardly furnishes an analogy.  To these and all other

subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with

reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was

simply saturated.  In season and out of season now in manifest, now

in recondite application, he presses it into the service of

expression and illustration.  At least a third of his myriad

metaphors are derived from it.  It would indeed be difficult to

find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a

single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by

it.  Much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily

accessible to him, namely Tottell's Precedents (1572), Pulton's

Statutes (1578), and Fraunce's Lawier's Logike (1588), works with

which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but much of it

could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with

legal proceedings.  We quite agree with Mr. Castle that

Shakespeare's legal knowledge is not what could have been picked up

in an attorney's office, but could only have been learned by an

actual attendance at the Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and on

circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the Bench and

Bar."



This is excellent.  But what is Mr. Collins' explanation.  "Perhaps

the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis

that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!), that he

there contracted a love for the law which never left him, that as a

young man in London, he continued to study or dabble in it for his

amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and to

frequent the society of lawyers.  On no other supposition is it

possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for

him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no

layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious display of

legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself from

tripping."



A lame conclusion.  "No other supposition" indeed!  Yes, there is

another, and a very obvious supposition, namely, that Shakespeare

was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade, versed in all the

ways of the courts, and living in close intimacy with judges and

members of the Inns of Court.



One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the

fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I

may be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance to his

pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those of Malone,

Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord Penzance, Mr.

Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed their opinion on

the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.



Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from Lord

Penzance's book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow

or other managed "to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal

principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms

and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the

pleader's chambers and the courts at Westminster."  This, as Lord

Penzance points out, "would require nothing short of employment in

some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal questions and

general legal work."  But "in what portion of Shakespeare's career

would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the

interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of

practising lawyers? . . . It is beyond doubt that at an early

period he was called upon to abandon his attendance at school and

assist his father, and was soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound

apprentice to a trade.  While under the obligation of this bond he

could not have pursued any other employment.  Then he leaves

Stratford and comes to London.  He has to provide himself with the

means of a livelihood, and this he did in some capacity at the

theatre.  No one doubts that.  The holding of horses is scouted by

many, and perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and certainly

unproved; but whatever the nature of his employment was at the

theatre, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have

been other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid.

Ere long he had been taken into the company as an actor, and was

soon spoken of as a 'Johannes Factotum.'  His rapid accumulation of

wealth speaks volumes for the constancy and activity of his

services.  One fails to see when there could be a break in the

current of his life at this period of it, giving room or

opportunity for legal or indeed any other employment.  'In 1589,'

says Knight, 'we have undeniable evidence that he had not only a

casual engagement, was not only a salaried servant, as many players

were, but was a shareholder in the company of the Queen's players

with other shareholders below him on the list.'  This (1589) would

be within two years after his arrival in London, which is placed by

White and Halliwell-Phillipps about the year 1587.  The difficulty

in supposing that, starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when

he is supposed to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon

a course of most extended study and mental culture, is almost

insuperable.  Still it was physically possible, provided always

that he could have had access to the needful books.  But this legal

training seems to me to stand on a different footing.  It is not

only unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by

the known facts of his career."  Lord Penzance then refers to the

fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant

White) several of the plays had been written.  The Comedy of Errors

in 1589, Love's Labour's Lost in 1589, Two Gentlemen of Verona in

1589 or 1590, and so forth, and then asks, "with this catalogue of

dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible that he could have

taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theatres,

and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the

performances of the provincial tours of his company--and at the

same time devoted himself to the study of the law in all its

branches so efficiently as to make himself complete master of its

principles and practice, and saturate his mind with all its most

technical terms?"



I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because it lay

before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter of

Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still better

set forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to me, which

beset the idea that Shakespeare might have found time in some

unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other occupations,

for the study of classics, literature and law, to say nothing of

languages and a few other matters.  Lord Penzance further asks his

readers:  "Did you ever meet with or hear of an instance in which a

young man in this country gave himself up to legal studies and

engaged in legal employments, which is the only way of becoming

familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless with the view

of practicing in that profession?  I do not believe that it would

be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance in which the

law has been seriously studied in all its branches, except as a

qualification for practice in the legal profession."





This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so

uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's,

and might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens,

and the rest of that ton of plaster of paris out of which the

biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which goes by the

Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me that the man who

wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and lawyers.  Also,

that that man could not have been the Stratford Shakespeare--and

WASN'T.



Who did write these Works, then?



I wish I knew.







CHAPTER IX







Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works?



Nobody knows.



We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been proved.

KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and

absolutely conclusive.  We can infer, if we want to, like those

slaves . . . No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it is

not courteous.  The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare

superstition call US the hardest names they can think of, and they

keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to

that level, let them do it, but I will not so undignify myself as

to follow them.  I cannot call them harsh names; the most I can do

is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval; and this

without malice, without venom.



To resume.  What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built

their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and

established facts.  It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to

be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything

else to resort to.



But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of

that sort.



Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we

infer that somebody did.  Who was it, then?  This requires some

more inferring.



Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a

tidal wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of

admiration, delight and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up

and claim the authorship.  Why a dozen, instead of only one or two?

One reason is, because there's a dozen that are recognizably

competent to do that poem.  Do you remember "Beautiful Snow"?  Do

you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep"?  Do you

remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight!  Make me

a child again just for to-night"?  I remember them very well.

Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who

were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible

argument in his favor, at least:  to wit, he could have done the

authoring; he was competent.



Have the Works been claimed by a dozen?  They haven't.  There was

good reason.  The world knows there was but one man on the planet

at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not two.  A long

time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a

procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--

footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a

mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed

to mush in it.  Was there any doubt as to who had made that mighty

trail?  Were there a dozen claimants?  Were there two?  No--the

people knew who it was that had been along there:  there was only

one Hercules.



There has been only one Shakespeare.  There couldn't be two;

certainly there couldn't be two at the same time.  It takes ages to

bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.  This

one was not matched before his time; nor during his time; and

hasn't been matched since.  The prospect of matching him in our

time is not bright.



The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not

qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.  They

claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both natural

and acquired--for the miracle; and that no other Englishman of his

day possessed the like; or, indeed, anything closely approaching

it.



Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and

horizonless magnitude of that equipment.  Also, he has synopsized

Bacon's history:  a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford

Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize.  Bacon's

history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death in old

age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and

multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and conjectures and might-

have-beens.



Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had

a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was

"distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian:  she

corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his

Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Archbishop

Parker could suggest a single alteration."  It is the atmosphere we

are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations

shall tend.  The atmosphere furnished by the parents to the son in

this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning; with

thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite

culture.  It had its natural effect.  Shakespeare of Stratford was

reared in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his

parents, were without education.  This may have had an effect upon

the son, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of

an informing sort.  There were but few books anywhere, in that day,

and only the well-to-do and highly educated possessed them, they

being almost confined to the dead languages.  "All the valuable

books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would

hardly have filled a single shelf"--imagine it!  The few existing

books were in the Latin tongue mainly.  "A person who was ignorant

of it was shut out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero

and Virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers,

and pamphlets of his own time"--a literature necessary to the

Stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation's sake, since the

writer of his Works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most

masterly way before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens

and into his twenties.



At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three

years there.  Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English

Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured,

the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during another three

years.  A total of six years spent at the sources of knowledge;

knowledge both of books and of men.  The three spent at the

university were coeval with the second and last three spent by the

little Stratford lad at Stratford school supposedly, and

perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to infer

from.  The second three of the Baconian six were "presumably" spent

by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher.  That is, the

thugs presume it--on no evidence of any kind.  Which is their way,

when they want a historical fact.  Fact and presumption are, for

business purposes, all the same to them.  They know the difference,

but they also know how to blink it.  They know, too, that while in

history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't

take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the

handling of it.  They know by old experience that when they get

hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in

their history-tank; no, they know how to develop him into the giant

four-legged bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and

puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-

stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a

thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so

loud.  The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons

where reasoning convinces but one.  I wouldn't be a thug, not even

if--but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the

argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides.  If I am better

than a thug, is the merit mine?  No, it is His.  Then to Him be the

praise.  That is the right spirit.



They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the

Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher.  They also

"presume" that the butcher was his father.  They don't know.  There

is no written record of it, nor any other actual evidence.  If it

would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him

to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers-

-all by their patented method "presumption."  If it will help their

case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will

"presume" that all those butchers were his father.  And the week

after, they will SAY it.  Why, it is just like being the past tense

of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic

irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the

expression which the grammarians call Verb.  It is like a whole

ancestry, with only one posterity.



To resume.  Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and

mastered that abstruse science.  From that day to the end of his

life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as

a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a

theatre, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a

renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in

the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived in the

law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability

forced his way up its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the

Lord Chancellorship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman

qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place.



When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other

illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,

brilliances, profundities and felicities so prodigally displayed in

the Plays, and try to fit them to the history-less Stratford stage-

manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when

we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they

seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there.

Please turn back and read them again.  Attributed to Shakespeare of

Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--

intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak;

attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of

the moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate,

not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified.  "At every turn

and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or

illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems

almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal

phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of

his pen."  That could happen to no one but a person whose TRADE was

the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.  Veteran mariners

fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their

similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere

PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could

do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to

try.  Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other great

authorities have said about Bacon when they thought they were

saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.







CHAPTER X







The Rest of the Equipment



The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his

time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind,

grace and majesty of expression.  Every one has said it, no one

doubts it.  Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always

wanting to break out.  We have no evidence of any kind that

Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of

these acquirements.  The only lines he ever wrote, so far as we

know, are substantially barren of them--barren of all of them.





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:





His language, WHERE HE COULD SPARE AND PASS BY A JEST, was nobly

censorious.  No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more

weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he

uttered.  No member of his speech but consisted of his (its) own

graces . . . The fear of every man that heard him was lest he

should make an end.





From Macaulay:





He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament, particularly by

his exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the King's

heart was set--the union of England and Scotland.  It was not

difficult for such an intellect to discover many irresistible

arguments in favor of such a scheme.  He conducted the great case

of the Post Nati in the Exchequer Chamber; and the decision of the

judges--a decision the legality of which may be questioned, but the

beneficial effect of which must be acknowledged--was in a great

measure attributed to his dexterous management.





Again:





While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of

law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy.  The noble

treatise on the Advancement of Learning, which at a later period

was expanded into the De Augmentis, appeared in 1605



The Wisdom of the Ancients, a work which if it had proceeded from

any other writer would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit

and learning, was printed in 1609.



In the meantime the Novum Organum was slowly proceeding.  Several

distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of

that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest

admiration of his genius.



Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the Cogitata et Visa, one of

the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great

oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all

proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master

workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but all the treatise

over did abound with choice conceits of the present state of

learning, and with worthy contemplations of the means to procure

it."



In 1612 a new edition of the Essays appeared, with additions

surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality.



Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the

most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his

mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling,"

to use his own phrase, "of the laws of England."



To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney General and

Solicitor General would have satisfied the appetite of any other

man for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary

industries just described, to satisfy his.  He was a born worker.





The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years

of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase

the regret with which we think on the many years which he had

wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as

was not worthy such a student."



He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of England

under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National

History, a Philosophical Romance.  He made extensive and valuable

additions to his Essays.  He published the inestimable Treatise De

Argumentis Scientiarum.





Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment,

and quiet his appetite for work?  Not entirely:





The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and

languor bore the mark of his mind.  THE BEST JESTBOOK IN THE WORLD

is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any

book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of

serious study.





Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light

upon Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he

was competent to write the Plays and Poems:





With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of

comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other

human being.



The "Essays" contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of

character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden or a

court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable

of taking in the whole world of knowledge.





His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave

to Prince Ahmed:  fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a

lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful Sultans might repose

beneath its shade.





The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of

the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.





In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord

Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."





Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,

he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of

rhetoric.





The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit,

so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and

to tyrannize over the whole man.





There are too many places in the Plays where this happens.  Poor

old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name,

is a pathetic instance of it.  "We may assume" that it is Bacon's

fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.



No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly

subjugated.  It stopped at the first check from good sense.





In truth much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--amid

things as strange as any that are described in the "Arabian Tales"

. . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,

fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,

conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more

formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious

than the balsam of Fierabras.  Yet in his magnificent day-dreams

there was nothing wild--nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.





Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the Novum Organum

. . . Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is

employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.  No book ever made

so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many

prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.



But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect

which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science-

-all the past, the present and the future, all the errors of two

thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all

the bright hopes of the coming age.





He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering

it portable.





His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in

literature.





It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts

and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally

displayed in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer

degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time.  He

was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable.  There was only

one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at one birth,

nor in one age.  He could have written anything that is in the

Plays and Poems.  He could have written this:





The cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.





Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be ye yt moves my bones.





When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd towers,

he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus

sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from great

poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort.  It will give him a

shock.  You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is,

until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.







CHAPTER XI







Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write

Shakespeare's Works?  Ah, now, what do you take me for?  Would I be

so soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for

nearly seventy-four years?  It would grieve me to know that any one

could think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so

unadmiringly of me.  No-no, I am aware that when even the brightest

mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a

superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind,

in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and

conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem

to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition.  I doubt if

I could do it myself.  We always get at second hand our notions

about systems of government; and high-tariff and low-tariff; and

prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the

glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and

approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs

concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the

murder of helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our

preferences in the matter of religious and political parties; and

our acceptance or rejection of the Shakespeares and the Arthur

Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys.  We get them all at second-hand, we

reason none of them out for ourselves.  It is the way we are made.

It is the way we are all made, and we can't help it, we can't

change it.  And whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have

been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and

refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear

and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty

and our devotion.  In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the

color of our environment and associations, and it is a color that

can safely be warranted to wash.  Whenever we have been furnished

with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that it

will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test the

jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it.  We submit, not

reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid we

should find, upon examination, that the jewels are of the sort that

are manufactured at North Adams, Mass.



I haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his

pedestal this side of the year 2209.  Disbelief in him cannot come

swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never

been known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a very slow process.  It

took several thousand years to convince our fine race--including

every splendid intellect in it--that there is no such thing as a

witch; it has taken several thousand years to convince that same

fine race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is

no such person as Satan; it has taken several centuries to remove

perdition from the Protestant Church's program of postmortem

entertainments; it has taken a weary long time to persuade American

Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the

best they can; and it looks as if their Scotch brethren will still

be burning babies in the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes

down from his perch.



We are The Reasoning Race.  We can't prove it by the above

examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories" built

by those Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a barrel of

sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can prove it by,

if I could think of them.  We are The Reasoning Race, and when we

find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing through the dust of

Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that Hercules

has been along there.  I feel that our fetish is safe for three

centuries yet.  The bust, too--there in the Stratford Church.  The

precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust, the serene bust,

the emotionless bust, with the dandy moustache, and the putty face,

unseamed of care--that face which has looked passionlessly down

upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and will still

look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep,

deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle, expression of a bladder.







CHAPTER XII







Irreverence



One of the most trying defects which I find in these--these--what

shall I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets to them,

the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant

to my nature and my dignity.  The furthest I can go in that

direction is to call them by names of limited reverence--names

merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never tainted by

harsh feeling.  If THEY would do like this, they would feel better

in their hearts.  Very well, then--to proceed.  One of the most

trying defects which I find in these Stratfordolaters, these

Shakesperoids, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes,

these herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these

bandoleers, is their spirit of irreverence.  It is detectable in

every utterance of theirs when they are talking about us.  I am

thankful that in me there is nothing of that spirit.  When a thing

is sacred to me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been

irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other

people.  Am I in the right?  I think so.  But I ask no one to take

my unsupported word; no, look at the dictionary; let the dictionary

decide.  Here is the definition:





Irreverence.  The quality or condition of irreverence toward God

and sacred things.





What does the Hindu say?  He says it is correct.  He says

irreverence is lack of respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and

Chrishna, and his other gods, and for his sacred cattle, and for

his temples and the things within them.  He endorses the

definition, you see; and there are 300,000,000 Hindus or their

equivalents back of him.



The dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital G it

could restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for OUR Deity and

our sacred things, but that ingenious and rather sly idea

miscarried:  for by the simple process of spelling HIS deities with

capitals the Hindu confiscates the definition and restricts it to

his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory upon us to revere

HIS gods and HIS sacred things, and nobody's else.  We can't say a

word, for he has our own dictionary at his back, and its decision

is final.



This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this:  1.  Whatever is

sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by everybody

else; 2, whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held in reverence

by everybody else; 3, therefore, by consequence, logically, and

indisputably, whatever is sacred to ME must be held in reverence by

everybody else.



Now then, what aggravates me is, that these troglodytes and

muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd

in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere

their Shakespeare and hold him sacred.  We can't have that:

there's enough of us already.  If you go on widening and spreading

and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded

that each man's sacred things are the ONLY ones, and the rest of

the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward them or

suffer for it.  That can surely happen, and when it happens, the

word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and

foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent and

dictatorial word in the language.  And people will say, "Whose

business is it, what gods I worship and what things hold sacred?

Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get

that right?"



We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us.  We must save

the word from this destruction.  There is but one way to do it, and

that is, to stop the spread of the privilege, and strictly confine

it to its present limits:  that is, to all the Christian sects, to

all the Hindu sects, and me.  We do not need any more, the stock is

watered enough, just as it is.



It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone.  I

think so because I am the only sect that knows how to employ it

gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately.  The other sects lack

the quality of self-restraint.  The Catholic Church says the most

irreverent things about matters which are sacred to the

Protestants, and the Protestant Church retorts in kind about the

confessional and other matters which Catholics hold sacred; then

both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and charge HIM

with irreverence.  This is all unfortunate, because it makes it

difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of mentality

to find out what Irreverence really IS.



It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of

regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall

eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me.  Then there will

be no more quarrelling, no more bandying of disrespectful epithets,

no more heart burnings.



There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-

Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me.  That will

simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease.  There will be

irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it.  The first time

those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their

Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-

Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last.  Taught

by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier offenders

by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet them.







CHAPTER XIII







Isn't it odd, when you think of it:  that you may list all the

celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times,

clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five hundred

names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories, biographies

and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one

of them.  Every one of them except one--the most famous, the most

renowned--by far the most illustrious of them all--Shakespeare!

You can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated

ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians,

comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets,

dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers,

statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters,

murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers,

misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers,

financiers, astronomers, naturalists, Claimants, impostors,

chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents

and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors,

politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots,

demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars,

highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons--you can get the

life-histories of all of them but ONE.  Just one--the most

extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all--Shakespeare!



You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished

by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can

find out the life-histories of all those people, too.  You will

then have listed 1500 celebrities, and you can trace the authentic

life-histories of the whole of them.  Save one--far and away the

most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation--Shakespeare!

About him you can find out NOTHING.  Nothing of even the slightest

importance.  Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your

memory.  Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever

anything more than a distinctly common-place person--a manager, an

actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did

not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten

all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave.  We can go to

the records and find out the life-history of every renowned RACE-

HORSE of modern times--but not Shakespeare's!  There are many

reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess

and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is

worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly

sufficient all by itself--HE HADN'T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD.  There

is no way of getting around that deadly fact.  And no sane way has

yet been discovered of getting around its formidable significance.



Its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do not use

the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he

lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations.

The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote

them it seems a pity the world did not find it out.  He ought to

have explained that he was the author, and not merely a nom de

plume for another man to hide behind.  If he had been less

intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous about

his Works, it would have been better for his good name, and a

kindness to us.  The bones were not important.  They will moulder

away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure until the

last sun goes down.



MARK TWAIN.





P.S.  March 25.  About two months ago I was illuminating this

Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the Bacon-

Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air the

opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public

consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly

obscure and unimportant.  And not only in great London, but also in

the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of a

century, and where he died and was buried.  I argued that if he had

been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had

much to tell about him many and many a year after his death,

instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact

connected with him.  I believed, and I still believe, that if he

had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine

has lasted in my native village out in Missouri.  It is a good

argument, a prodigiously strong one, and a most formidable one for

even the most gifted, and ingenious, and plausible Stratfordolater

to get around or explain away.  To-day a Hannibal Courier-Post of

recent date has reached me, with an article in it which reinforces

my contention that a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten

in his village in the short space of sixty years.  I will make an

extract from it:





Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but

ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she

has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son Mark Twain,

or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the

estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous

and the town that made him famous.  His name is associated with

every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern

structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill

or cave over or through which he might by any possibility have

roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove into his

stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island, or Mark Twain

Cave, are now monuments to his genius.  Hannibal is glad of any

opportunity to do him honor as he has honored her.



So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school with

Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been

honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent

mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary

boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every

boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come.

Like Aunt Beckey and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was

hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as

a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad after all.  So

they have been in no hesitancy about drawing out the bad things he

did as well as the good in their efforts to get a "Mark Twain

story," all incidents being viewed in the light of his present

fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already considerable and

growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop away and the stories

are retold second and third hand by their descendants.  With some

seventy-three years young and living in a villa instead of a house

he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent

himself as he will, there are some of his "works" that will go

swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as gray-beards gather about

the fires and begin with "I've heard father tell" or possibly "Once

when I."





The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.



And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper.  Of date twenty

days ago:





Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason, 408

Rock Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years.

The deceased was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of the famous

characters in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.  She had been a member of

the Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years,

and was a highly respected lady.  For the past eight years she had

been an invalid, but was as well cared for by Mr. Dickason and his

family as if she had been a near relative.  She was a member of the

Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.





I remember her well.  I have a picture of her in my mind which was

graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago.

She was at that time nine years old, and I was about eleven.  I

remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I can still see

her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-

linen frock.  She was crying.  What it was about, I have long ago

forgotten.  But it was the tears that preserved the picture for me,

no doubt.  She was a good child, I can say that for her.  She knew

me nearly seventy years ago.  Did she forget me, in the course of

time?  I think not.  If she had lived in Stratford in Shakespeare's

time, would she have forgotten him?  Yes.  For he was never famous

during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and there

wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a

week.



"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were prominent and

very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations ago.

Plenty of gray-heads there remember them to this day, and can tell

you about them.  Isn't it curious that two "town-drunkards" and one

half-breed loafer should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian

village, a fame a hundred times greater and several hundred times

more particularized in the matter of definite facts than

Shakespeare left behind him in the village where he had lived the

half of his lifetime?



MARK TWAIN.







Footnotes:



{1}  Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.



{2}  From chapter XIII of "The Shakespeare Problem Restated."



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