likely to result, most likely to result, indeed substantially SURE
to result in the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the
human race. Like me.
My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the
banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I
entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to
another in the village during nine and a half years. Then my
father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened
circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill
forever, and I became a printer’s apprentice, on board and clothes,
and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place of them.
This for summer wear, probably. I lived in Hannibal fifteen and a
half years, altogether, then ran away, according to the custom of
persons who are intending to become celebrated. I never lived
there afterward. Four years later I became a “cub” on a
Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and
after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the U. S.
inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings
and decided that I knew every inch of the Mississippi–thirteen
hundred miles–in the dark and in the day–as well as a baby knows
the way to its mother’s paps day or night. So they licensed me as
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
dozens of incidents of their young lives and mine together; things
that happened to us in the morning of life, in the blossom of our
youth, in the good days, the dear days, “the days when we went
gipsying, a long time ago.” Most of them creditable to me, too.
One child to whom I paid court when she was five years old and I
eight still lives in Hannibal, and she visited me last summer,
traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred miles of railroad
without damage to her patience or to her old-young vigor. Another
little lassie to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when she was
nine years old and I the same, is still alive–in London–and hale
and hearty, just as I am. And on the few surviving steamboats–
those lingering ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied
the big river in the beginning of my water-career–which is exactly
as long ago as the whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare
number–there are still findable two or three river-pilots who saw