e 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 thi