him, as he himself boasted, to see how much holy indignation he could
stir up in the world.


WHO WROTE 1601?

The correct and complete title of 1601, as first issued, was: [Date,
1601.] 'Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of
the Tudors.' For many years after its anonymous first issue in 1880,
its authorship was variously conjectured and widely disputed. In Boston,
William T. Ball, one of the leading theatrical critics during the late
90's, asserted that it was originally written by an English actor (name
not divulged) who gave it to him. Ball's original, it was said, looked
like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed, and may indeed have
been a proof pulled in some newspaper office. In St. Louis, William
Marion Reedy, editor of the St. Louis Mirror, had seen this famous tour
de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first
learned from Eugene Field that it was from the pen of Mark Twain.

"Many people," said Reedy, "thought the thing was done by Field and
attributed, as a joke, to Mark Twain. Field had a perfect genius for
that sort of thing, as many extant specimens attest, and for that sort of
practical joke; but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too mellow
--not hard and bright and bitter--to be Eugene Field's." Reedy's opinion
hits off the fundamental difference between these two great humorists;
one half suspects that Reedy was thinking of Field's French Crisis.

But Twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in 1906,
in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Orr, librarian of Case Library,
Cleveland. Said Clemens, in the course of his letter, dated July 30,