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 most formidable one for even the most gifted and
ingenious and plausible Stratfordolator to get around or explain away.
Today 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