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