-_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 t