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