initial commit of ebook 3190HEADmain

4 files changed, 3386 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/mtsxn10.txt b/old/mtsxn10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9be569d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/mtsxn10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1700 @@
+******The Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601, by Mark Twain******
+#51 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.
+
+Please do not remove this.
+
+This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book.
+Do not change or edit it without written permission.  The words
+are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
+need about what they can legally do with the texts.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+
+As of 12/12/00 contributions are only being solicited from people in:
+Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
+Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana,
+Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota,
+Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met,
+additions to this list will be made and fund raising
+will begin in the additional states.  Please feel
+free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+International donations are accepted,
+but we don't know ANYTHING about how 
+to make them tax-deductible, or 
+even if they CAN be made deductible, 
+and don't have the staff to handle it
+even if there are ways.
+
+These donations should be made to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+
+Title: 1601
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3190]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 02/16/01]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+******The Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601, by Mark Twain******
+*****This file should be named mtsxn10.txt or mtsxn10.zip*****
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, mtsxn11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mtsxn10a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
+of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after
+the official publication date.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext02
+or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02
+
+Or /etext01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext
+files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in:
+Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
+Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana,
+Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota,
+Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met,
+additions to this list will be made and fund raising
+will begin in the additional states.
+
+These donations should be made to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
+EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541,
+has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal
+Revenue Service (IRS).  Donations are tax-deductible to the extent
+permitted by law.  As the requirements for other states are met,
+additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the
+additional states.
+
+All donations should be made to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation.  Mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Avenue
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109  [USA]
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+***
+
+
+Example command-line FTP session:
+
+ftp ftp.ibiblio.org
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc.
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may 
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the 
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.  
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time, 
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+1601
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+                              MARK TWAIN'S
+                              [Date, 1601]
+
+                              Conversation
+                    As it was by the Social Fireside
+                       in the Time of the Tudors
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+"Born irreverent," scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, "--like all
+other people I have ever known or heard of--I am hoping to remain so
+while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of."
+--[Holograph manuscript of Samuel L.  Clemens, in the collection of the
+F. J. Meine]
+
+Mark Twain was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his
+richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language,
+genteel literature, and conventional idiocies.  Later, when a magazine
+editor apostrophized, "O that we had a Rabelais!"  Mark impishly and
+anonymously--submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais,
+scathingly abused it and the sender.  In this episode, as in many others,
+Mark Twain, the "bad boy" of American literature, revealed his huge
+delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy.  Too, there was
+always the spirit of Tom Sawyer deviltry in Mark's make-up that prompted
+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
+go'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,
+1906, from Dublin, New Hampshire:
+
+"The title of the piece is 1601.  The piece is a supposititious
+conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year,
+between the Queen, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duchess
+of Bilgewater, and one or two others, and is not, as John Hay mistakenly
+supposes, a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to
+the sober and chaste Elizabeth's time; if there is a decent word findable
+in it, it is because I overlooked it.  I hasten to assure you that it is
+not printed in my published writings."
+
+
+TWITTING THE REV. JOSEPH TWICHELL
+
+The circumstances of how 1601 came to be written have since been
+officially revealed by Albert Bigelow Paine in 'Mark Twain,
+A Bibliography' (1912), and in the publication of Mark Twain's Notebook
+(1935).
+
+1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had
+retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County, New York.  Here Mrs. Clemens
+enjoyed relief from social obligations, the children romped over the
+countryside, and Mark retired to his octagonal study, which, perched high
+on the hill, looked out upon the valley below.  It was in the famous
+summer of 1876, too, that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom
+Sawyer.  Before the close of the same year he had already begun work on
+'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', published in 1885.  It is
+interesting to note the use of the title, the "Duke of Bilgewater," in
+Huck Finn when the "Duchess of Bilgewater" had already made her
+appearance in 1601.  Sandwiched between his two great masterpieces, Tom
+Sawyer and Huck Finn, the writing of 1601 was indeed a strange interlude.
+
+During this prolific period Mark wrote many minor items, most of them
+rejected by Howells, and read extensively in one of his favorite books,
+Pepys' Diary.  Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys'
+style and spirit, and "he determined," says Albert Bigelow Paine in his
+'Mark Twain, A Biography', "to try his hand on an imaginary record of
+conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of
+the period.  The result was 'Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen
+Elizabeth', or as he later called it, '1601'.  The 'conversation'
+recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the
+outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside
+sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy, vocabulary, and
+physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention."
+
+"It was written as a letter," continues Paine, "to that robust divine,
+Rev. Joseph Twichell," who, unlike Howells, had no scruples about Mark's
+'Elizabethan breadth of parlance.'"
+
+The Rev.  Joseph Twichell, Mark's most intimate friend for over forty
+years, was pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford,
+which Mark facetiously called the "Church of the Holy Speculators,"
+because of its wealthy parishioners.  Here Mark had first met "Joe" at a
+social, and their meeting ripened into a glorious, life long friendship.
+Twichell was a man of about Mark's own age, a profound scholar, a devout
+Christian, "yet a man with an exuberant sense of humor, and a profound
+understanding of the frailties of mankind."  The Rev. Mr. Twichell
+performed the marriage ceremony for Mark Twain and solemnized the births
+of his children; "Joe," his friend, counseled him on literary as well as
+personal matters for the remainder of Mark's life.  It is important to
+catch this brief glimpse of the man for whom this masterpiece was
+written, for without it one can not fully understand the spirit in which
+1601 was written, or the keen enjoyment which Mark and "Joe" derived from
+it.
+
+
+"SAVE ME ONE."
+
+The story of the first issue of 1601 is one of finesse, state diplomacy,
+and surreptitious printing.
+
+The Rev. "Joe" Twichell, for whose delectation the piece had been
+written, apparently had pocketed the document for four long years.  Then,
+in 1880, it came into the hands of John Hay, later Secretary of State,
+presumably sent to him by Mark Twain.  Hay pronounced the sketch a
+masterpiece, and wrote immediately to his old Cleveland friend, Alexander
+Gunn, prince of connoisseurs in art and literature.  The following
+correspondence reveals the fine diplomacy which made the name of John Hay
+known throughout the world.
+
+
+                          DEPARTMENT OF STATE
+                               Washington
+
+                                                       June 21, 1880.
+Dear Gunn:
+
+Are you in Cleveland for all this week?  If you will say yes by return
+mail, I have a masterpiece to submit to your consideration which is only
+in my hands for a few days.
+
+Yours, very much worritted by the depravity of Christendom,
+
+                                        Hay
+
+
+The second letter discloses Hay's own high opinion of the effort and his
+deep concern for its safety.
+
+
+
+                                                       June 24, 1880
+My dear Gunn:
+
+Here it is.  It was written by Mark Twain in a serious effort to bring
+back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste Elizabethan
+standard.  But the taste of the present day is too corrupt for anything
+so classic.  He has not yet been able even to find a publisher.  The
+Globe has not yet recovered from Downey's inroad, and they won't touch
+it.
+
+I send it to you as one of the few lingering relics of that race of
+appreciative critics, who know a good thing when they see it.
+
+Read it with reverence and gratitude and send it back to me; for Mark is
+impatient to see once more his wandering offspring.
+
+                                        Yours,
+                                                  Hay.
+
+
+In his third letter one can almost hear Hay's chuckle in the certainty
+that his diplomatic, if somewhat wicked, suggestion would bear fruit.
+
+
+                                                       Washington, D. C.
+                                                       July 7, 1880
+My dear Gunn:
+
+I have your letter, and the proposition which you make to pull a few
+proofs of the masterpiece is highly attractive, and of course highly
+immoral.  I cannot properly consent to it, and I am afraid the great many
+would think I was taking an unfair advantage of his confidence.  Please
+send back the document as soon as you can, and if, in spite of my
+prohibition, you take these proofs, save me one.
+
+                              Very truly yours,
+                                             John Hay.
+
+
+
+Thus was this Elizabethan dialogue poured into the moulds of cold type.
+According to Merle Johnson, Mark Twain's bibliographer, it was issued in
+pamphlet form, without wrappers or covers; there were 8 pages of text and
+the pamphlet measured 7 by 8 « inches.  Only four copies are believed to
+have been printed, one for Hay, one for Gunn, and two for Twain.
+
+"In the matter of humor," wrote Clemens, referring to Hay's delicious
+notes, "what an unsurpassable touch John Hay had!"
+
+
+HUMOR AT WEST POINT
+
+The first printing of 1601 in actual book form was "Donne at ye Academie
+Press, in 1882, West Point, New York, under the supervision of Lieut.  C.
+E. S. Wood, then adjutant of the U. S. Military Academy.
+
+In 1882 Mark Twain and Joe Twichell visited their friend Lieut. Wood at
+West Point, where they learned that Wood, as Adjutant, had under his
+control a small printing establishment.  On Mark's return to Hartford,
+Wood received a letter asking if he would do Mark a great favor by
+printing something he had written, which he did not care to entrust to
+the ordinary printer.  Wood replied that he would be glad to oblige.
+On April 3, 1882, Mark sent the manuscript:
+
+"I enclose the original of 1603 [sic] as you suggest.  I am afraid there
+are errors in it, also, heedlessness in antiquated spelling--e's stuck on
+often at end of words where they are not strickly necessary, etc.....
+I would go through the manuscript but I am too much driven just now, and
+it is not important anyway.  I wish you would do me the kindness to make
+any and all corrections that suggest themselves to you.
+
+                                   Sincerely yours,
+                                             S.  L.  Clemens."
+
+
+Charles Erskine Scott Wood recalled in a foreword, which he wrote for the
+limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he felt when he
+first saw the original manuscript.  "When I read it," writes Wood,
+"I felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a
+printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the
+pretended 'conversation.'
+
+"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a
+species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually
+deceive a scholar.  Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his
+only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was
+becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I
+brought to the doing.
+
+"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade
+linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to
+mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the
+'copy' on a hand press.  I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan
+abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the
+(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).
+
+"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English
+words introduced.  The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but
+the text is exactly as written by Mark.  I wrote asking his view of
+making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to
+do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."
+
+Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious
+masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified
+institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.
+
+"1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a
+century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that I was
+rather inordinately vain of it.  At that time it had been privately
+printed in several countries, among them Japan.  A sumptuous edition on
+large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point
+--an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings and such
+people.  In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I
+was there six years ago, and none to be had."
+
+
+FROM THE DEPTHS
+
+Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an
+irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the
+well-springs of human nature.  In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted
+Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off
+human beings and left them cringing before the public view.  With the
+deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and
+delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.
+
+The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep
+in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed
+1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,
+
+"If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose
+I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining
+was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period.
+He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen, pilots,
+roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people--as
+Lincoln did.
+
+"He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,
+gamblers and the men of '49.  The simple roughness of a frontier people
+was in his blood and brain.
+
+"Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him.
+Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,
+picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation.  Such language is
+forcible as all primitive words are.  Refinement seems to make for
+weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic
+words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that.  Then
+I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
+puritanism.  But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
+sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
+Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more
+obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries.  Every
+word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
+vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but
+only as language to express his meaning.  No act of nature is obscene in
+itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
+purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
+I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what
+Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"
+
+Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also a
+semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
+Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
+Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
+sense of character.  It was made especially effective by the artistic
+arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of a
+phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in the
+spacious times of great Elizabeth."
+
+Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried
+over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere
+delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals.
+That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent
+from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers
+to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:
+
+"Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
+assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have made
+a Comanche blush.  Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
+However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of that
+kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England
+had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and
+conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundred years ago; in
+fact clear into our own nineteenth century--in which century, broadly
+speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and the real gentleman
+discoverable in English history,--or in European history, for that
+matter--may be said to have made their appearance.  Suppose Sir Walter
+[Scott] instead of putting the conversation into the mouths of his
+characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves?  We
+should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena
+which would embarrass a tramp in our day.  However, to the unconsciously
+indelicate all things are delicate."
+
+Mark Twain's interest in history and in the depiction of historical
+periods and characters is revealed through his fondness for historical
+reading in preference to fiction, and through his other historical
+writings.  Even in the hilarious, youthful days in San Francisco, Paine
+reports that "Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep.  Then,
+as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose
+himself in English or French history until his sleep conquered."  Paine
+tells us, too, that Lecky's 'European Morals' was an old favorite.
+
+The notes to 'The Prince and the Pauper' show again how carefully Clemens
+examined his historical background, and his interest in these materials.
+Some of the more important sources are noted: Hume's 'History of
+England', Timbs' 'Curiosities of London', J. Hammond Trumbull's 'Blue
+Laws, True and False'.  Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as Bernard
+DeVoto points out, "The book is always Mark Twain.  Its parodies of Tudor
+speech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom--Mark
+hugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys."  The writing of
+1601 foreshadows his fondness for this treatment.
+
+     "Do you suppose the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to
+     do only with delicate lady-words?  with gloved gentleman words"
+                              Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'.
+
+Although 1601 was not matched by any similar sketch in his published
+works, it was representative of Mark Twain the man.  He was no emaciated
+literary tea-tosser.  Bronzed and weatherbeaten son of the West, Mark was
+a man's man, and that significant fact is emphasized by the several
+phases of Mark's rich life as steamboat pilot, printer, miner, and
+frontier journalist.
+
+On the Virginia City Enterprise Mark learned from editor R. M. Daggett
+that "when it was necessary to call a man names, there were no expletives
+too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession to emphasize
+the utter want of character of the man assailed....  There were
+typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would have
+frightened a Bengal tiger.  The news editor could damn a mutilated
+dispatch in twenty-four languages."
+
+In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark Twain
+and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "The Doleful
+Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollected erotica.
+One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to find his room-mate
+standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big
+revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement," relates Paine in
+his Biography.
+
+"'Come here, Steve,' he said.  'I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead
+on him.'
+
+"'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him.  Just swear at him.  You can easily
+kill him at any range with your profanity.'
+
+"Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeing
+blast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexican hairless
+dog."
+
+Nor did Mark's "geysers of profanity" cease spouting after these gay and
+youthful days in San Francisco.  With Clemens it may truly be said that
+profanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.
+
+"It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts," recalled Katy Leary,
+life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, "and he'd swear
+something terrible if I didn't.  If he found a shirt in his drawer
+without a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer and
+throw them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of the bathroom
+window they'd go.  I used to look out every morning to see the
+snowflakes--anything white.  Out they'd fly....  Oh! he'd swear at
+anything when he was on a rampage.  He'd swear at his razor if it didn't
+cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
+sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter.  Well, I'd go and
+knock; I'd say, 'Mrs.  Clemens wants to know what's the matter.'  And
+then he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me
+Katy?'  'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.'  Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he
+was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs.
+Clemens hated swearing."  But his swearing never seemed really bad to
+Katy Leary, "It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said.
+"Sort of amusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore
+like an angel."
+
+In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
+billiards.  "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
+Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace.  "He loved the game,
+and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then
+the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more
+youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort.  Gently,
+slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
+they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
+stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."
+
+Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself.  In Paris, in his
+appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
+Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
+of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found
+its way into published literature." It is rumored to have been called
+"Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."
+
+In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W.  Fisher to accompany him on an exploration
+of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned that
+Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secret treasure
+chests for the famous visitor.  One of these guarded treasures was a
+volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to Frederick the
+Great.  "Too much is enough," Mark is reported to have said, when Fisher
+translated some of the verses, "I would blush to remember any of these
+stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna."
+When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him Mark put it into his
+pocket, saying, "Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is so busy mispronouncing
+German these days she can't even attempt to get at this."
+
+In his letters, too, Howells observed, "He had the Southwestern, the
+Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one
+ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was
+often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he
+had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear
+to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
+look at them.  I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that
+in it he was Shakespearean."
+
+          "With a nigger squat on her safety-valve"
+                         John Hay, Pike County Ballads.
+
+"Is there any other explanation," asks Van Wyck Brooks, "'of his
+Elizabethan breadth of parlance?'  Mr.  Howells confesses that he
+sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,
+to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not
+bear to reread.  Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,
+while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing out in
+an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having
+'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.'  Mark Twain's verbal
+Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not
+having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left
+thereto ferment.  No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of
+forbidden words.  Consider the famous book, 1601, that fireside
+conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsolete verbal
+indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly
+resurrected and assembled there?  He, whose blood was in constant ferment
+and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for
+him the roitous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve,
+and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the
+waste of a priceless psychic material!"  Thus, Brooks lumps 1601 with
+Mark Twain's "bawdry," and interprets it simply as another indication of
+frustration.
+
+
+FIGS FOR FIG LEAVES!
+
+Of course, the writing of such a piece as 1601 raised the question of
+freedom of expression for the creative artist.
+
+Although little discussed at that time, it was a question which intensely
+interested Mark, and for a fuller appreciation of Mark's position one
+must keep in mind the year in which 1601 was written, 1876.  There had
+been nothing like it before in American literature; there had appeared no
+Caldwells, no Faulkners, no Hemingways.  Victorian England was gushing
+Tennyson.  In the United States polite letters was a cult of the Brahmins
+of Boston, with William Dean Howells at the helm of the Atlantic.  Louisa
+May Alcott published Little Women in 1868-69, and Little Men in 1871.  In
+1873 Mark Twain led the van of the debunkers, scraping the gilt off the
+lily in the Gilded Age.
+
+In 1880 Mark took a few pot shots at license in Art and Literature in his
+Tramp Abroad, "I wonder why some things are?  For instance, Art is
+allowed as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times--but the
+privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed
+within the past eighty or ninety years.  Fielding and Smollet could
+portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have
+plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed
+to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.
+But not so with Art.  The brush may still deal freely with any subject;
+however revolting or indelicate.  It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every
+pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation has
+been doing with the statues.  These works, which had stood in innocent
+nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now.  Yes, every one of them.
+Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help noticing
+it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous.  But the comical thing
+about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid
+marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and
+ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blooded paintings which do
+really need it have in no case been furnished with it.
+
+"At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues of
+a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated grime--they
+hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures have been
+thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious
+generation.  You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery
+that exists in the world....  and there, against the wall, without
+obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the
+vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus.  It
+isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is the
+attitude of one of her arms and hand.  If I ventured to describe the
+attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for
+anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,
+for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges.  I saw young girls
+stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly
+at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic
+interest.  How I should like to describe her--just to see what a holy
+indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the unreflecting
+average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all
+that.
+
+"In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage,
+oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerable suffering--
+pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful
+detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and
+publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for they are innocent,
+they are inoffensive, being works of art.  But suppose a literary artist
+ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of
+these grisly things--the critics would skin him alive.  Well, let it go,
+it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost
+hers.  Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the
+consistencies of it--I haven't got time."
+
+
+PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY
+
+Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor Edward
+Wagenknecht as "the most famous piece of pornography in American
+literature."  Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like the little
+boy who is shocked to see "naughty" words chalked on the back fence,
+and thinks they are pornography.  The initiated, after years of wading
+through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant difference
+between filthy filth and funny "filth."  Dirt for dirt's sake is
+something else again.  Pornography, an eminent American jurist has
+pointed out, is distinguished by the "leer of the sensualist."
+
+"The words which are criticised as dirty," observed justice John M.
+Woolsey in the United States District Court of New York, lifting the ban
+on Ulysses by James Joyce, "are old Saxon words known to almost all men
+and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally
+and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical
+and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe."  Neither was there
+"pornographic intent," according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulysses
+obscene within the legal definition of that word.
+
+"The meaning of the word 'obscene,'" the Justice indicated, "as legally
+defined by the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to
+sexually impure and lustful thoughts.
+
+"Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and
+thoughts must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on a
+person with average sex instincts--what the French would call 'l'homme
+moyen sensuel'--who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role
+of hypothetical reagent as does the 'reasonable man' in the law of torts
+and 'the learned man in the art' on questions of invention in patent
+law."
+
+Obviously, it is ridiculous to say that the "leer of the sensualist"
+lurks in the pages of Mark Twain's 1601.
+
+
+DROLL STORY
+
+"In a way," observed William Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's whole
+works what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's.  It is better than the
+privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed,
+an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in
+the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from
+Shakespeare's urn.  It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say,
+from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of Hardy's books.  And, though
+it be filthy, it yet hath a splendor of mere animalism of good spirits...
+I would say it is scatalogical rather than erotic, save for one touch
+toward the end.  Indeed, it seems more of Rabelais than of Boccaccio or
+Masuccio or Aretino--is brutally British rather than lasciviously
+latinate, as to the subjects, but sumptuous as regards the language."
+
+Immediately upon first reading, John Hay, later Secretary of State, had
+proclaimed 1601 a masterpiece.  Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's
+biographer, likewise acknowledged its greatness, when he said, "1601 is a
+genuine classic, as classics of that sort go.  It is better than the
+gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps in some day to come, the taste
+that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary
+refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of Mark
+Twain.  Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of
+environment and point of view."
+
+"It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not," wrote
+Clemens in his notebook in 1879.  "I built a conversation which could
+have happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601.  I sent
+it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the
+sender!
+
+But that man was a praiser of Rabelais and had been saying, 'O that we
+had a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one.
+
+"Then I took it to one of the greatest, best and most learned of Divines
+[Rev. Joseph H. Twichell] and read it to him.  He came within an ace of
+killing himself with laughter (for between you and me the thing was
+dreadfully funny.  I don't often write anything that I laugh at myself,
+but I can hardly think of that thing without laughing).  That old Divine
+said it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art--and David Gray of
+the Buffalo Courier said it ought to be printed privately and left behind
+me when I died, and then my fame as a literary artist would last."
+
+FRANKLIN J. MEINE
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST PRINTING
+     Verbatim Reprint
+
+
+[Date, 1601.]
+
+CONVERSATION, AS IT WAS BY THE SOCIAL FIRESIDE, IN THE TIME OF THE
+TUDORS.
+
+[Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the
+Pepys of that day, the same being Queen Elizabeth's cup-bearer.  He is
+supposed to be of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these
+literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath, to see the queen
+stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels that his nobility
+is defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay
+there till her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.]
+
+
+
+YESTERNIGHT
+toke her maiste ye queene a fantasie such as she sometimes hath, and had
+to her closet certain that doe write playes, bokes, and such like, these
+being my lord Bacon, his worship Sir Walter Ralegh, Mr. Ben Jonson, and
+ye child Francis Beaumonte, which being but sixteen, hath yet turned his
+hand to ye doing of ye Lattin masters into our Englishe tong, with grete
+discretion and much applaus.  Also came with these ye famous Shaxpur.  A
+righte straunge mixing truly of mighty blode with mean, ye more in
+especial since ye queenes grace was present, as likewise these following,
+to wit: Ye Duchess of Bilgewater, twenty-two yeres of age; ye Countesse
+of Granby, twenty-six; her doter, ye Lady Helen, fifteen; as also these
+two maides of honor, to-wit, ye Lady Margery Boothy, sixty-five, and ye
+Lady Alice Dilberry, turned seventy, she being two yeres ye queenes
+graces elder.
+
+I being her maites cup-bearer, had no choice but to remaine and beholde
+rank forgot, and ye high holde converse wh ye low as uppon equal termes,
+a grete scandal did ye world heare thereof.
+
+In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an
+exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore,
+and then--
+
+Ye Queene.--Verily in mine eight and sixty yeres have I not heard the
+fellow to this fart.  Meseemeth, by ye grete sound and clamour of it, it
+was male; yet ye belly it did lurk behinde shoulde now fall lean and flat
+against ye spine of him yt hath bene delivered of so stately and so waste
+a bulk, where as ye guts of them yt doe quiff-splitters bear, stand
+comely still and rounde.  Prithee let ye author confess ye offspring.
+Will my Lady Alice testify?
+
+Lady Alice.--Good your grace, an' I had room for such a thundergust
+within mine ancient bowels, 'tis not in reason I coulde discharge ye same
+and live to thank God for yt He did choose handmaid so humble whereby to
+shew his power.  Nay, 'tis not I yt have broughte forth this rich
+o'ermastering fog, this fragrant gloom, so pray you seeke ye further.
+
+Ye Queene.--Mayhap ye Lady Margery hath done ye companie this favor?
+
+Lady Margery.--So please you madam, my limbs are feeble wh ye weighte and
+drouth of five and sixty winters, and it behoveth yt I be tender unto
+them.  In ye good providence of God, an' I had contained this wonder,
+forsoothe wolde I have gi'en 'ye whole evening of my sinking life to ye
+dribbling of it forth, with trembling and uneasy soul, not launched it
+sudden in its matchless might, taking mine own life with violence,
+rending my weak frame like rotten rags.  It was not I, your maisty.
+
+Ye Queene.--O' God's name, who hath favored us?  Hath it come to pass yt
+a fart shall fart itself?  Not such a one as this, I trow.  Young Master
+Beaumont--but no; 'twould have wafted him to heaven like down of goose's
+boddy.  'Twas not ye little Lady Helen--nay, ne'er blush, my child;
+thoul't tickle thy tender maidenhedde with many a mousie-squeak before
+thou learnest to blow a harricane like this.  Wasn't you, my learned and
+ingenious Jonson?
+
+Jonson.--So fell a blast hath ne'er mine ears saluted, nor yet a stench
+so all-pervading and immortal.  'Twas not a novice did it, good your
+maisty, but one of veteran experience--else hadde he failed of
+confidence.  In sooth it was not I.
+
+Ye Queene.--My lord Bacon?
+
+Lord Bacon.-Not from my leane entrailes hath this prodigy burst forth, so
+please your grace.  Naught doth so befit ye grete as grete performance;
+and haply shall ye finde yt 'tis not from mediocrity this miracle hath
+issued.
+
+[Tho' ye subjoct be but a fart, yet will this tedious sink of learning
+pondrously phillosophize.  Meantime did the foul and deadly stink pervade
+all places to that degree, yt never smelt I ye like, yet dare I not to
+leave ye presence, albeit I was like to suffocate.]
+
+Ye Queene.--What saith ye worshipful Master Shaxpur?
+
+Shaxpur.--In the great hand of God I stand and so proclaim mine
+innocence.  Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of
+this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its
+quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement
+in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit
+itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook
+the globe in admiration of it.
+
+[Then was there a silence, and each did turn him toward the worshipful
+Sr Walter Ralegh, that browned, embattled, bloody swashbuckler, who
+rising up did smile, and simpering say,]
+
+Sr W.--Most gracious maisty, 'twas I that did it, but indeed it was so
+poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am wont to furnish, yt in
+sooth I was ashamed to call the weakling mine in so august a presence.
+It was nothing--less than nothing, madam--I did it but to clear my nether
+throat; but had I come prepared, then had I delivered something worthy.
+Bear with me, please your grace, till I can make amends.
+
+[Then delivered he himself of such a godless and rock-shivering blast
+that all were fain to stop their ears, and following it did come so dense
+and foul a stink that that which went before did seem a poor and trifling
+thing beside it.  Then saith he, feigning that he blushed and was
+confused, I perceive that I am weak to-day, and cannot justice do unto my
+powers; and sat him down as who should say, There, it is not much yet he
+that hath an arse to spare, let him fellow that, an' he think he can.  By
+God, an' I were ye queene, I would e'en tip this swaggering braggart out
+o' the court, and let him air his grandeurs and break his intolerable
+wind before ye deaf and such as suffocation pleaseth.]
+
+Then fell they to talk about ye manners and customs of many peoples, and
+Master Shaxpur spake of ye boke of ye sieur Michael de Montaine, wherein
+was mention of ye custom of widows of Perigord to wear uppon ye
+headdress, in sign of widowhood, a jewel in ye similitude of a man's
+member wilted and limber, whereat ye queene did laugh and say widows in
+England doe wear prickes too, but betwixt the thighs, and not wilted
+neither, till coition hath done that office for them.  Master Shaxpur did
+likewise observe how yt ye sieur de Montaine hath also spoken of a
+certain emperor of such mighty prowess that he did take ten maidenheddes
+in ye compass of a single night, ye while his empress did entertain two
+and twenty lusty knights between her sheetes, yet was not satisfied;
+whereat ye merrie Countess Granby saith a ram is yet ye emperor's
+superior, sith he wil tup above a hundred yewes 'twixt sun and sun; and
+after, if he can have none more to shag, will masturbate until he hath
+enrich'd whole acres with his seed.
+
+Then spake ye damned windmill, Sr Walter, of a people in ye uttermost
+parts of America, yt capulate not until they be five and thirty yeres of
+age, ye women being eight and twenty, and do it then but once in seven
+yeres.
+
+Ye Queene.--How doth that like my little Lady Helen?  Shall we send thee
+thither and preserve thy belly?
+
+Lady Helen.--Please your highnesses grace, mine old nurse hath told me
+there are more ways of serving God than by locking the thighs together;
+yet am I willing to serve him yt way too, sith your highnesses grace hath
+set ye ensample.
+
+Ye Queene.--God' wowndes a good answer, childe.
+
+Lady Alice.--Mayhap 'twill weaken when ye hair sprouts below ye navel.
+
+Lady Helen.--Nay, it sprouted two yeres syne; I can scarce more than
+cover it with my hand now.
+
+Ye Queene.--Hear Ye that, my little Beaumonte?  Have ye not a little
+birde about ye that stirs at hearing tell of so sweete a neste?
+
+Beaumonte.--'Tis not insensible, illustrious madam; but mousing owls and
+bats of low degree may not aspire to bliss so whelming and ecstatic as is
+found in ye downy nests of birdes of Paradise.
+
+Ye Queene.--By ye gullet of God, 'tis a neat-turned compliment.  With
+such a tongue as thine, lad, thou'lt spread the ivory thighs of many a
+willing maide in thy good time, an' thy cod-piece be as handy as thy
+speeche.
+
+Then spake ye queene of how she met old Rabelais when she was turned of
+fifteen, and he did tell her of a man his father knew that had a double
+pair of bollocks, whereon a controversy followed as concerning the most
+just way to spell the word, ye contention running high betwixt ye learned
+Bacon and ye ingenious Jonson, until at last ye old Lady Margery,
+wearying of it all, saith, 'Gentles, what mattereth it how ye shall spell
+the word?  I warrant Ye when ye use your bollocks ye shall not think of
+it; and my Lady Granby, be ye content; let the spelling be, ye shall
+enjoy the beating of them on your buttocks just the same, I trow.  Before
+I had gained my fourteenth year I had learnt that them that would explore
+a cunt stop'd not to consider the spelling o't.'
+
+Sr W.--In sooth, when a shift's turned up, delay is meet for naught but
+dalliance.  Boccaccio hath a story of a priest that did beguile a maid
+into his cell, then knelt him in a corner to pray for grace to be rightly
+thankful for this tender maidenhead ye Lord had sent him; but ye abbot,
+spying through ye key-hole, did see a tuft of brownish hair with fair
+white flesh about it, wherefore when ye priest's prayer was done, his
+chance was gone, forasmuch as ye little maid had but ye one cunt, and
+that was already occupied to her content.
+
+Then conversed they of religion, and ye mightie work ye old dead Luther
+did doe by ye grace of God.  Then next about poetry, and Master Shaxpur
+did rede a part of his King Henry IV., ye which, it seemeth unto me,
+is not of ye value of an arsefull of ashes, yet they praised it bravely,
+one and all.
+
+Ye same did rede a portion of his "Venus and Adonis," to their prodigious
+admiration, whereas I, being sleepy and fatigued withal, did deme it but
+paltry stuff, and was the more discomforted in that ye blody bucanier had
+got his wind again, and did turn his mind to farting with such villain
+zeal that presently I was like to choke once more.  God damn this windy
+ruffian and all his breed.  I wolde that hell mighte get him.
+
+They talked about ye wonderful defense which old Sr. Nicholas Throgmorton
+did make for himself before ye judges in ye time of Mary; which was
+unlucky matter to broach, sith it fetched out ye quene with a 'Pity yt
+he, having so much wit, had yet not enough to save his doter's
+maidenhedde sound for her marriage-bed.'  And ye quene did give ye damn'd
+Sr. Walter a look yt made hym wince--for she hath not forgot he was her
+own lover it yt olde day.  There was silent uncomfortableness now; 'twas
+not a good turn for talk to take, sith if ye queene must find offense in
+a little harmless debauching, when pricks were stiff and cunts not loathe
+to take ye stiffness out of them, who of this company was sinless;
+behold, was not ye wife of Master Shaxpur four months gone with child
+when she stood uppe before ye altar?  Was not her Grace of Bilgewater
+roger'd by four lords before she had a husband?  Was not ye little Lady
+Helen born on her mother's wedding-day?  And, beholde, were not ye Lady
+Alice and ye Lady Margery there, mouthing religion, whores from ye
+cradle?
+
+In time came they to discourse of Cervantes, and of the new painter,
+Rubens, that is beginning to be heard of.  Fine words and dainty-wrought
+phrases from the ladies now, one or two of them being, in other days,
+pupils of that poor ass, Lille, himself; and I marked how that Jonson and
+Shaxpur did fidget to discharge some venom of sarcasm, yet dared they not
+in the presence, the queene's grace being ye very flower of ye Euphuists
+herself.  But behold, these be they yt, having a specialty, and admiring
+it in themselves, be jealous when a neighbor doth essaye it, nor can
+abide it in them long.  Wherefore 'twas observable yt ye quene waxed
+uncontent; and in time labor'd grandiose speeche out of ye mouth of Lady
+Alice, who manifestly did mightily pride herself thereon, did quite
+exhauste ye quene's endurance, who listened till ye gaudy speeche was
+done, then lifted up her brows, and with vaste irony, mincing saith 'O
+shit!' Whereat they alle did laffe, but not ye Lady Alice, yt olde
+foolish bitche.
+
+Now was Sr. Walter minded of a tale he once did hear ye ingenious
+Margrette of Navarre relate, about a maid, which being like to suffer
+rape by an olde archbishoppe, did smartly contrive a device to save her
+maidenhedde, and said to him, First, my lord, I prithee, take out thy
+holy tool and piss before me; which doing, lo his member felle, and would
+not rise again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               FOOTNOTES
+                              To Frivolity
+
+The historical consistency of 1601 indicates that Twain must have given
+the subject considerable thought.  The author was careful to speak only
+of men who conceivably might have been in the Virgin Queen's closet and
+engaged in discourse with her.
+
+
+THE CHARACTERS
+
+At this time (1601) Queen Elizabeth was 68 years old.  She speaks of
+having talked to "old Rabelais" in her youth.  This might have been
+possible as Rabelais died in 1552, when the Queen was 19 years old.
+
+Among those in the party were Shakespeare, at that time 37 years old; Ben
+Jonson, 27; and Sir Walter Raleigh, 49.  Beaumont at the time was 17, not
+16.  He was admitted as a member of the Inner Temple in 1600, and his
+first translations, those from Ovid, were first published in 1602.
+Therefore, if one were holding strictly to the year date, neither by age
+nor by fame would Beaumont have been eligible to attend such a gathering
+of august personages in the year 1601; but the point is unimportant.
+
+
+THE ELIZABETHAN WRITERS
+
+In the Conversation Shakespeare speaks of Montaigne's Essays.  These were
+first published in 1580 and successive editions were issued in the years
+following, the third volume being published in 1588.  "In England
+Montaigne was early popular.  It was long supposed that the autograph of
+Shakespeare in a copy of Florio's translation showed his study of the
+Essays.  The autograph has been disputed, but divers passages, and
+especially one in The Tempest, show that at first or second hand the poet
+was acquainted with the essayist." (Encyclopedia Brittanica.)
+
+The company at the Queen's fireside discoursed of Lilly (or Lyly),
+English dramatist and novelist of the Elizabethan era, whose novel,
+Euphues, published in two parts, 'Euphues', or the 'Anatomy of Wit'
+(1579) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580) was a literary sensation.
+It is said to have influenced literary style for more than a quarter of a
+century, and traces of its influence are found in Shakespeare.  (Columbia
+Encyclopedia).
+
+The introduction of Ben Jonson into the party was wholly appropriate,
+if one may call to witness some of Jonson's writings.  The subject under
+discussion was one that Jonson was acquainted with, in The Alchemist:
+
+
+Act. I, Scene I,
+
+FACE:  Believe't I will.
+
+SUBTLE:  Thy worst.  I fart at thee.
+
+DOL COMMON:  Have you your wits?  Why, gentlemen, for love----
+
+
+Act. 2, Scene I,
+
+SIR EPICURE MAMMON: ....and then my poets, the same that writ so subtly
+of the fart, whom I shall entertain still for that subject and again in
+Bartholomew Fair
+
+NIGHTENGALE: (sings a ballad)
+     Hear for your love, and buy for your money.
+     A delicate ballad o' the ferret and the coney.
+     A preservative again' the punk's evil.
+     Another goose-green starch, and the devil.
+     A dozen of divine points, and the godly garter
+     The fairing of good counsel, of an ell and three-quarters.
+     What is't you buy?
+     The windmill blown down by the witche's fart,
+     Or Saint George, that, O! did break the dragon's heart.
+
+
+GOOD OLD ENGLISH CUSTOM
+
+That certain types of English society have not changed materially in
+their freedom toward breaking wind in public can be noticed in some
+comparatively recent literature.  Frank Harris in My Life, Vol. 2,
+Ch. XIII, tells of Lady Marriott, wife of a judge Advocate General,
+being compelled to leave her own table, at which she was entertaining Sir
+Robert Fowler, then the Lord Mayor of London, because of the suffocating
+and nauseating odors there.  He also tells of an instance in parliament,
+and of a rather brilliant bon mot spoken upon that occasion.
+
+"While Fowler was speaking Finch-Hatton had shewn signs of restlessness;
+towards the end of the speech he had moved some three yards away from the
+Baronet.  As soon as Fowler sat down Finch-Hatton sprang up holding his
+handkerchief to his nose:
+
+"'Mr. Speaker,' he began, and was at once acknowledged by the Speaker,
+for it was a maiden speech, and as such was entitled to precedence by the
+courteous custom of the House, 'I know why the Right Honourable Member
+from the City did not conclude his speech with a proposal.  The only way
+to conclude such a speech appropriately would be with a motion!'"
+
+
+AEOLIAN CREPITATIONS
+
+But society had apparently degenerated sadly in modern times, and even in
+the era of Elizabeth, for at an earlier date it was a serious--nay,
+capital--offense to break wind in the presence of majesty.  The Emperor
+Claudius, hearing that one who had suppressed the urge while paying him
+court had suffered greatly thereby, "intended to issue an edict, allowing
+to all people the liberty of giving vent at table to any distension
+occasioned by flatulence:"
+
+Martial, too (Book XII, Epigram LXXVII), tells of the embarrassment of
+one who broke wind while praying in the Capitol,
+
+"One day, while standing upright, addressing his prayers to Jupiter,
+Aethon farted in the Capitol.  Men laughed, but the Father of the Gods,
+offended, condemned the guilty one to dine at home for three nights.
+Since that time, miserable Aethon, when he wishes to enter the Capitol,
+goes first to Paterclius' privies and farts ten or twenty times.  Yet, in
+spite of this precautionary crepitation, he salutes Jove with constricted
+buttocks."  Martial also (Book IV, Epigram LXXX), ridicules a woman who
+was subject to the habit, saying,
+
+"Your Bassa, Fabullus, has always a child at her side, calling it her
+darling and her plaything; and yet--more wonder--she does not care for
+children.  What is the reason then.  Bassa is apt to fart.  (For which
+she could blame the unsuspecting infant.)"
+
+The tale is told, too, of a certain woman who performed an aeolian
+crepitation at a dinner attended by the witty Monsignieur Dupanloup,
+Bishop of Orleans, and that when, to cover up her lapse, she began to
+scrape her feet upon the floor, and to make similar noises, the Bishop
+said, "Do not trouble to find a rhyme, Madam!"
+
+Nay, worthier names than those of any yet mentioned have discussed the
+matter.  Herodotus tells of one such which was the precursor to the fall
+of an empire and a change of dynasty--that which Amasis discharges while
+on horseback, and bids the envoy of Apries, King of Egypt, catch and
+deliver to his royal master.  Even the exact manner and posture of
+Amasis, author of this insult, is described.
+
+St. Augustine (The City of God, XIV:24) cites the instance of a man who
+could command his rear trumpet to sound at will, which his learned
+commentator fortifies with the example of one who could do so in tune!
+
+Benjamin Franklin, in his "Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels" has
+canvassed suggested remedies for alleviating the stench attendant upon
+these discharges:
+
+"My Prize Question therefore should be:  To discover some Drug, wholesome
+and--not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that
+shall render the natural discharges of Wind from our Bodies not only
+inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes.
+
+"That this is not a Chimerical Project & altogether impossible, may
+appear from these considerations.  That we already have some knowledge of
+means capable of varying that smell.  He that dines on stale Flesh,
+especially with much Addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a stink
+that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some time on
+Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible of
+the most delicate Noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the Report,
+he may anywhere give vent to his Griefs, unnoticed.  But as there are
+many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, & as a
+little quick Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity
+of fetid Air arising from the vast Mass of putrid Matter contained in
+such Places, and render it pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a
+little Powder of Lime (or some other equivalent) taken in our Food, or
+perhaps a Glass of Lime Water drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect
+on the Air produced in and issuing from our Bowels?"
+
+One curious commentary on the text is that Elizabeth should be so fond of
+investigating into the authorship of the exhalation in question, when she
+was inordinately fond of strong and sweet perfumes; in fact, she was
+responsible for the tremendous increase in importations of scents into
+England during her reign.
+
+
+"YE BOKE OF YE SIEUR MICHAEL DE MONTAINE"
+
+There is a curious admixture of error and misunderstanding in this part
+of the sketch.  In the first place, the story is borrowed from Montaigne,
+where it is told inaccurately, and then further corrupted in the telling.
+
+It was not the good widows of Perigord who wore the phallus upon their
+coifs; it was the young married women, of the district near Montaigne's
+home, who paraded it to view upon their foreheads, as a symbol, says our
+essayist, "of the joy they derived therefrom." If they became widows,
+they reversed its position, and covered it up with the rest of their
+head-dress.
+
+The "emperor" mentioned was not an emperor; he was Procolus, a native of
+Albengue, on the Genoese coast, who, with Bonosus, led the unsuccessful
+rebellion in Gaul against Emperor Probus.  Even so keen a commentator as
+Cotton has failed to note the error.
+
+The empress (Montaigne does not say "his empress") was Messalina, third
+wife of the Emperor Claudius, who was uncle of Caligula and foster-father
+to Nero.  Furthermore, in her case the charge is that she copulated with
+twenty-five in a single night, and not twenty-two, as appears in the
+text.  Montaigne is right in his statistics, if original sources are
+correct, whereas the author erred in transcribing the incident.
+
+As for Proculus, it has been noted that he was associated with Bonosus,
+who was as renowned in the field of Bacchus as was Proculus in that of
+Venus (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).  The feat of
+Proculus is told in his own words, in Vopiscus, (Hist. Augustine, p. 246)
+where he recounts having captured one hundred Sarmatian virgins, and
+unmaidened ten of them in one night, together with the happenings
+subsequent thereto.
+
+Concerning Messalina, there appears to be no question but that she was a
+nymphomaniac, and that, while Empress of Rome, she participated in some
+fearful debaucheries.  The question is what to believe, for much that we
+have heard about her is almost certainly apocryphal.
+
+The author from whom Montaigne took his facts is the elder Pliny, who,
+in his Natural History, Book X, Chapter 83, says, "Other animals become
+sated with veneral pleasures; man hardly knows any satiety.  Messalina,
+the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an
+empress, selected for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the
+most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute;
+and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day,
+at the twenty-fifth embrace."
+
+But Pliny, notwithstanding his great attainments, was often a retailer of
+stale gossip, and in like case was Aurelius Victor, another writer who
+heaped much odium on her name.  Again, there is a great hiatus in the
+Annals of Tacitus, a true historian, at the period covering the earlier
+days of the Empress; while Suetonius, bitter as he may be, is little more
+than an anecdotist.  Juvenal, another of her detractors, is a prejudiced
+witness, for he started out to satirize female vice, and naturally aimed
+at high places.  Dio also tells of Messalina's misdeeds, but his work is
+under the same limitations as that of Suetonius.  Furthermore, none but
+Pliny mentions the excess under consideration.
+
+However, "where there is much smoke there must be a little fire," and
+based upon the superimposed testimony of the writers of the period, there
+appears little doubt but that Messalina was a nymphomaniac, that she
+prostituted herself in the public stews, naked, and with gilded nipples,
+and that she did actually marry her chief adulterer, Silius, while
+Claudius was absent at Ostia, and that the wedding was consummated in the
+presence of a concourse of witnesses.  This was "the straw that broke the
+camel's back."  Claudius hastened back to Rome, Silius was dispatched,
+and Messalina, lacking the will-power to destroy herself, was killed when
+an officer ran a sword through her abdomen, just as it appeared that
+Claudius was about to relent.
+
+
+"THEN SPAKE YE DAMNED WINDMILL, SIR WALTER"
+
+Raleigh is thoroughly in character here; this observation is quite in
+keeping with the general veracity of his account of his travels in
+Guiana, one of the most mendacious accounts of adventure ever told.
+Naturally, the scholarly researches of Westermarck have failed to
+discover this people; perhaps Lady Helen might best be protected among
+the Jibaros of Ecuador, where the men marry when approaching forty.
+
+Ben Jonson in his Conversations observed "That Sr. W. Raughlye esteemed
+more of fame than of conscience."
+
+
+YE VIRGIN QUEENE
+
+Grave historians have debated for centuries the pretensions of Elizabeth
+to the title, "The Virgin Queen," and it is utterly impossible to dispose
+of the issue in a note.  However, the weight of opinion appears to be in
+the negative.  Many and great were the difficulties attending the
+marriage of a Protestant princess in those troublous times, and Elizabeth
+finally announced that she would become wedded to the English nation,
+and she wore a ring in token thereof until her death.  However, more or
+less open liaisons with Essex and Leicester, as well as a host of lesser
+courtiers, her ardent temperament, and her imperious temper, are
+indications that cannot be denied in determining any estimate upon the
+point in question.
+
+Ben Jonson in his Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden
+says,
+
+"Queen Elizabeth never saw herself after she became old in a true glass;
+they painted her, and sometymes would vermillion her nose.  She had
+allwayes about Christmass evens set dice that threw sixes or five, and
+she knew not they were other, to make her win and esteame herself
+fortunate.  That she had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of
+man, though for her delight she tried many.  At the comming over of
+Monsieur, there was a French Chirurgion who took in hand to cut it, yett
+fear stayed her, and his death."
+
+It was a subject which again intrigued Clemens when he was abroad with
+W. H. Fisher, whom Mark employed to "nose up" everything pertaining to
+Queen Elizabeth's manly character.
+
+
+"'BOCCACCIO HATH A STORY"
+
+The author does not pay any great compliment to Raleigh's memory here.
+There is no such tale in all Boccaccio.  The nearest related incident
+forms the subject matter of Dineo's novel (the fourth) of the First day
+of the Decameron.
+
+
+OLD SR. NICHOLAS THROGMORTON
+
+The incident referred to appears to be Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's trial
+for complicity in the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen of England,
+a charge of which he was acquitted.  This so angered Queen Mary that she
+imprisoned him in the Tower, and fined the jurors from one to two
+thousand pounds each.  Her action terrified succeeding juries, so that
+Sir Nicholas's brother was condemned on no stronger evidence than that
+which had failed to prevail before.  While Sir Nicholas's defense may
+have been brilliant, it must be admitted that the evidence was weak.
+He was later released from the Tower, and under Elizabeth was one of a
+group of commissioners sent by that princess into Scotland, to foment
+trouble with Mary, Queen of Scots.  When the attempt became known,
+Elizabeth repudiated the acts of her agents, but Sir Nicholas, having
+anticipated this possibility, had sufficient foresight to secure
+endorsement of his plan by the Council, and so outwitted Elizabeth, who
+was playing a two-faced role, and Cecil, one of the greatest statesmen
+who ever held the post of principal minister.  Perhaps it was this
+incident to which the company referred, which might in part explain
+Elizabeth's rejoinder.  However, he had been restored to confidence ere
+this, and had served as ambassador to France.
+
+
+"TO SAVE HIS DOTER'S MAIDENHEDDE"
+
+Elizabeth Throckmorton (or Throgmorton), daughter of Sir Nicholas, was
+one of Elizabeth's maids of honor.  When it was learned that she had been
+debauched by Raleigh, Sir Walter was recalled from his command at sea by
+the Queen, and compelled to marry the girl.  This was not "in that olde
+daie," as the text has it, for it happened only eight years before the
+date of this purported "conversation," when Elizabeth was sixty years
+old.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+The various printings of 1601 reveal how Mark Twain's 'Fireside
+Conversation' has become a part of the American printer's lore.  But more
+important, its many printings indicate that it has become a popular bit
+of American folklore, particularly for men and women who have a feeling
+for Mark Twain.  Apparently it appeals to the typographer, who devotes to
+it his worthy art, as well as to the job printer, who may pull a crudely
+printed proof.  The gay procession of curious printings of 1601 is unique
+in the history of American printing.
+
+Indeed, the story of the various printings of 1601 is almost legendary.
+In the days of the "jour." printer, so I am told, well-thumbed copies
+were carried from print shop to print shop.  For more than a quarter
+century now it has been one of the chief sources of enjoyment for
+printers' devils; and many a young rascal has learned about life from
+this Fireside Conversation.  It has been printed all over the country,
+and if report is to be believed, in foreign countries as well.  Because
+of the many surreptitious and anonymous printings it is exceedingly
+difficult, if not impossible, to compile a complete bibliography.  Many
+printings lack the name of the publisher, the printer, the place or date
+of printing.  In many instances some of the data, through the patient
+questioning of fellow collectors, has been obtained and supplied.
+
+
+1.  [Date, 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the
+Time of the Tudors.
+
+DESCRIPTION: Pamphlet, pp. [ 1 ]-8, without wrappers or cover, measuring
+7x8 inches.  The title is Set in caps. and small caps.
+
+The excessively rare first printing, printed in Cleveland, 1880, at the
+instance of Alexander Gunn, friend of John Hay.  Only four copies are
+believed to have been printed, of which, it is said now, the only known
+copy is located in the Willard S. Morse collection.
+
+
+2.  Date 1601.  Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the
+time of the Tudors.
+
+(Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the
+Pepys of that day, the same being cup-bearer to Queen Elizabeth.  It is
+supposed that he is of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these
+literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath to see the Queen
+stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels his nobility
+defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay
+there till Her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.)
+
+DESCRIPTION: Title as above, verso blank; pp. [i]-xi, text; verso p. xi
+blank.  About 8 x 10 inches, printed on handmade linen paper soaked in
+weak coffee, wrappers.  The title is set in caps and small caps.
+
+COLOPHON: at the foot of p. xi: Done Att Ye Academie Preffe; M DCCC LXXX
+II.
+
+The privately printed West Point edition, the first printing of the text
+authorized by Mark Twain, of which but fifty copies were printed.  The
+story of this printing is fully told in the Introduction.
+
+
+3.  Conversation As It Was By The Social Fire-side In The Time Of The
+Tudors from Ye Diary of Ye Cupbearer to her Maisty Queen Elizabeth.
+[design] Imprinted by Ye Puritan Press At Ye Sign of Ye Jolly Virgin
+1601.
+
+DESCRIPTION: 2 blank leaves; p. [i] blank, p. [ii] fronds., p. [iii]
+title [as above], p. [iv] "Mem.", pp. 1-[25] text, I blank leaf.  4 3/4
+by 6 1/4 inches, printed in a modern version of the Caxton black letter
+type, on M.B.M.  French handmade paper.  The frontispiece, a woodcut by
+A. E. Curtis, is a portrait of the cup-bearer.  Bound in buff-grey
+boards, buckram back.  Cover title reads, in pale red ink, Caxton type,
+Conversation As It Was By The Social Fire-side In The Time Of The Tudors.
+[The Byway Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1901, 120 copies.]
+
+Probably the first published edition.
+
+Later, in 1916, a facsimile edition of this printing was published in
+Chicago from plates.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601
+by Mark Twain
+
diff --git a/old/mtsxn10.zip b/old/mtsxn10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..61c5dd3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/mtsxn10.zip
diff --git a/old/mtsxn11.txt b/old/mtsxn11.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b99b65b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/mtsxn11.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1686 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601, by Mark Twain
+#51 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before distributing this or any other
+Project Gutenberg file.
+
+We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your
+own disk, thereby keeping an electronic path open for future
+readers.  Please do not remove this.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
+view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
+The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the
+information they need to understand what they may and may not
+do with the etext.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These Etexts Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
+further information, is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+
+
+
+Title: 1601
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3190]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 16, 2001]
+[Most recently updated: March 18, 2004]
+
+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601, by Mark Twain***
+**This file should be named mtsxn11.txt or mtsxn11.zip**
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, mtsxn12.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mtsxn11a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+etexts, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2001 as we release over 50 new Etext
+files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 4000+
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 4,000 Etexts.  We need
+funding, as well as continued efforts by volunteers, to maintain
+or increase our production and reach our goals.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of November, 2001, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware,
+Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky,
+Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon,
+Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee,
+Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin,
+and Wyoming.
+
+*In Progress
+
+We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+All donations should be made to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fundraising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fundraising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
+and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
+[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
+of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
+software or any other related product without express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+1601
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+                              MARK TWAIN'S
+                              [Date, 1601]
+
+                              Conversation
+                    As it was by the Social Fireside
+                       in the Time of the Tudors
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+"Born irreverent," scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, "--like all
+other people I have ever known or heard of--I am hoping to remain so
+while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of."
+--[Holograph manuscript of Samuel L.  Clemens, in the collection of the
+F. J. Meine]
+
+Mark Twain was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his
+richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language,
+genteel literature, and conventional idiocies.  Later, when a magazine
+editor apostrophized, "O that we had a Rabelais!"  Mark impishly and
+anonymously--submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais,
+scathingly abused it and the sender.  In this episode, as in many others,
+Mark Twain, the "bad boy" of American literature, revealed his huge
+delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy.  Too, there was
+always the spirit of Tom Sawyer deviltry in Mark's make-up that prompted
+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,
+1906, from Dublin, New Hampshire:
+
+"The title of the piece is 1601.  The piece is a supposititious
+conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year,
+between the Queen, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duchess
+of Bilgewater, and one or two others, and is not, as John Hay mistakenly
+supposes, a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to
+the sober and chaste Elizabeth's time; if there is a decent word findable
+in it, it is because I overlooked it.  I hasten to assure you that it is
+not printed in my published writings."
+
+
+TWITTING THE REV. JOSEPH TWICHELL
+
+The circumstances of how 1601 came to be written have since been
+officially revealed by Albert Bigelow Paine in 'Mark Twain,
+A Bibliography' (1912), and in the publication of Mark Twain's Notebook
+(1935).
+
+1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had
+retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County, New York.  Here Mrs. Clemens
+enjoyed relief from social obligations, the children romped over the
+countryside, and Mark retired to his octagonal study, which, perched high
+on the hill, looked out upon the valley below.  It was in the famous
+summer of 1876, too, that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom
+Sawyer.  Before the close of the same year he had already begun work on
+'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', published in 1885.  It is
+interesting to note the use of the title, the "Duke of Bilgewater," in
+Huck Finn when the "Duchess of Bilgewater" had already made her
+appearance in 1601.  Sandwiched between his two great masterpieces, Tom
+Sawyer and Huck Finn, the writing of 1601 was indeed a strange interlude.
+
+During this prolific period Mark wrote many minor items, most of them
+rejected by Howells, and read extensively in one of his favorite books,
+Pepys' Diary.  Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys'
+style and spirit, and "he determined," says Albert Bigelow Paine in his
+'Mark Twain, A Biography', "to try his hand on an imaginary record of
+conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of
+the period.  The result was 'Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen
+Elizabeth', or as he later called it, '1601'.  The 'conversation'
+recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the
+outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside
+sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy, vocabulary, and
+physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention."
+
+"It was written as a letter," continues Paine, "to that robust divine,
+Rev. Joseph Twichell, who, unlike Howells, had no scruples about Mark's
+'Elizabethan breadth of parlance.'"
+
+The Rev.  Joseph Twichell, Mark's most intimate friend for over forty
+years, was pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford,
+which Mark facetiously called the "Church of the Holy Speculators,"
+because of its wealthy parishioners.  Here Mark had first met "Joe" at a
+social, and their meeting ripened into a glorious, life long friendship.
+Twichell was a man of about Mark's own age, a profound scholar, a devout
+Christian, "yet a man with an exuberant sense of humor, and a profound
+understanding of the frailties of mankind."  The Rev. Mr. Twichell
+performed the marriage ceremony for Mark Twain and solemnized the births
+of his children; "Joe," his friend, counseled him on literary as well as
+personal matters for the remainder of Mark's life.  It is important to
+catch this brief glimpse of the man for whom this masterpiece was
+written, for without it one can not fully understand the spirit in which
+1601 was written, or the keen enjoyment which Mark and "Joe" derived from
+it.
+
+
+"SAVE ME ONE."
+
+The story of the first issue of 1601 is one of finesse, state diplomacy,
+and surreptitious printing.
+
+The Rev. "Joe" Twichell, for whose delectation the piece had been
+written, apparently had pocketed the document for four long years.  Then,
+in 1880, it came into the hands of John Hay, later Secretary of State,
+presumably sent to him by Mark Twain.  Hay pronounced the sketch a
+masterpiece, and wrote immediately to his old Cleveland friend, Alexander
+Gunn, prince of connoisseurs in art and literature.  The following
+correspondence reveals the fine diplomacy which made the name of John Hay
+known throughout the world.
+
+
+                          DEPARTMENT OF STATE
+                               Washington
+
+                                                       June 21, 1880.
+Dear Gunn:
+
+Are you in Cleveland for all this week?  If you will say yes by return
+mail, I have a masterpiece to submit to your consideration which is only
+in my hands for a few days.
+
+Yours, very much worritted by the depravity of Christendom,
+
+                                        Hay
+
+
+The second letter discloses Hay's own high opinion of the effort and his
+deep concern for its safety.
+
+
+
+                                                       June 24, 1880
+My dear Gunn:
+
+Here it is.  It was written by Mark Twain in a serious effort to bring
+back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste Elizabethan
+standard.  But the taste of the present day is too corrupt for anything
+so classic.  He has not yet been able even to find a publisher.  The
+Globe has not yet recovered from Downey's inroad, and they won't touch
+it.
+
+I send it to you as one of the few lingering relics of that race of
+appreciative critics, who know a good thing when they see it.
+
+Read it with reverence and gratitude and send it back to me; for Mark is
+impatient to see once more his wandering offspring.
+
+                                        Yours,
+                                                  Hay.
+
+
+In his third letter one can almost hear Hay's chuckle in the certainty
+that his diplomatic, if somewhat wicked, suggestion would bear fruit.
+
+
+                                                       Washington, D. C.
+                                                       July 7, 1880
+My dear Gunn:
+
+I have your letter, and the proposition which you make to pull a few
+proofs of the masterpiece is highly attractive, and of course highly
+immoral.  I cannot properly consent to it, and I am afraid the great many
+would think I was taking an unfair advantage of his confidence.  Please
+send back the document as soon as you can, and if, in spite of my
+prohibition, you take these proofs, save me one.
+
+                              Very truly yours,
+                                             John Hay.
+
+
+
+Thus was this Elizabethan dialogue poured into the moulds of cold type.
+According to Merle Johnson, Mark Twain's bibliographer, it was issued in
+pamphlet form, without wrappers or covers; there were 8 pages of text and
+the pamphlet measured 7 by 8 1/2 inches.  Only four copies are believed to
+have been printed, one for Hay, one for Gunn, and two for Twain.
+
+"In the matter of humor," wrote Clemens, referring to Hay's delicious
+notes, "what an unsurpassable touch John Hay had!"
+
+
+HUMOR AT WEST POINT
+
+The first printing of 1601 in actual book form was "Donne at ye Academie
+Press," in 1882, West Point, New York, under the supervision of Lieut.  C.
+E. S. Wood, then adjutant of the U. S. Military Academy.
+
+In 1882 Mark Twain and Joe Twichell visited their friend Lieut. Wood at
+West Point, where they learned that Wood, as Adjutant, had under his
+control a small printing establishment.  On Mark's return to Hartford,
+Wood received a letter asking if he would do Mark a great favor by
+printing something he had written, which he did not care to entrust to
+the ordinary printer.  Wood replied that he would be glad to oblige.
+On April 3, 1882, Mark sent the manuscript:
+
+"I enclose the original of 1603 [sic] as you suggest.  I am afraid there
+are errors in it, also, heedlessness in antiquated spelling--e's stuck on
+often at end of words where they are not strickly necessary, etc.....
+I would go through the manuscript but I am too much driven just now, and
+it is not important anyway.  I wish you would do me the kindness to make
+any and all corrections that suggest themselves to you.
+
+                                   "Sincerely yours,
+                                             "S.  L.  Clemens."
+
+
+Charles Erskine Scott Wood recalled in a foreword, which he wrote for the
+limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he felt when he
+first saw the original manuscript.  "When I read it," writes Wood,
+"I felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a
+printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the
+pretended 'conversation.'
+
+"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a
+species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually
+deceive a scholar.  Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his
+only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was
+becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I
+brought to the doing.
+
+"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade
+linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to
+mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the
+'copy' on a hand press.  I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan
+abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the
+(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).
+
+"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English
+words introduced.  The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but
+the text is exactly as written by Mark.  I wrote asking his view of
+making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to
+do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."
+
+Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious
+masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified
+institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.
+
+"1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a
+century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that I was
+rather inordinately vain of it.  At that time it had been privately
+printed in several countries, among them Japan.  A sumptuous edition on
+large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point
+--an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings and such
+people.  In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I
+was there six years ago, and none to be had."
+
+
+FROM THE DEPTHS
+
+Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an
+irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the
+well-springs of human nature.  In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted
+Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off
+human beings and left them cringing before the public view.  With the
+deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and
+delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.
+
+The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep
+in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed
+1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,
+
+"If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose
+I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining
+was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period.
+He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen, pilots,
+roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people--as
+Lincoln did.
+
+"He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,
+gamblers and the men of '49.  The simple roughness of a frontier people
+was in his blood and brain.
+
+"Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him.
+Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,
+picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation.  Such language is
+forcible as all primitive words are.  Refinement seems to make for
+weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic
+words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that.  Then
+I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
+puritanism.  But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
+sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
+Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more
+obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries.  Every
+word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
+vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but
+only as language to express his meaning.  No act of nature is obscene in
+itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
+purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
+I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what
+Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"
+
+Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also a
+semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
+Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
+Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
+sense of character.  It was made especially effective by the artistic
+arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of a
+phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in the
+spacious times of great Elizabeth."
+
+Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried
+over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere
+delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals.
+That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent
+from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers
+to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:
+
+"Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
+assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have made
+a Comanche blush.  Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
+However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of that
+kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England
+had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and
+conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundred years ago; in
+fact clear into our own nineteenth century--in which century, broadly
+speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and the real gentleman
+discoverable in English history,--or in European history, for that
+matter--may be said to have made their appearance.  Suppose Sir Walter
+[Scott] instead of putting the conversation into the mouths of his
+characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves?  We
+should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena
+which would embarrass a tramp in our day.  However, to the unconsciously
+indelicate all things are delicate."
+
+Mark Twain's interest in history and in the depiction of historical
+periods and characters is revealed through his fondness for historical
+reading in preference to fiction, and through his other historical
+writings.  Even in the hilarious, youthful days in San Francisco, Paine
+reports that "Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep.  Then,
+as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose
+himself in English or French history until his sleep conquered."  Paine
+tells us, too, that Lecky's 'European Morals' was an old favorite.
+
+The notes to 'The Prince and the Pauper' show again how carefully Clemens
+examined his historical background, and his interest in these materials.
+Some of the more important sources are noted: Hume's 'History of
+England', Timbs' 'Curiosities of London', J. Hammond Trumbull's 'Blue
+Laws, True and False'.  Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as Bernard
+DeVoto points out, "The book is always Mark Twain.  Its parodies of Tudor
+speech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom--Mark
+hugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys."  The writing of
+1601 foreshadows his fondness for this treatment.
+
+     "Do you suppose the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to
+     do only with delicate lady-words?  with gloved gentleman words"
+                              Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'.
+
+Although 1601 was not matched by any similar sketch in his published
+works, it was representative of Mark Twain the man.  He was no emaciated
+literary tea-tosser.  Bronzed and weatherbeaten son of the West, Mark was
+a man's man, and that significant fact is emphasized by the several
+phases of Mark's rich life as steamboat pilot, printer, miner, and
+frontier journalist.
+
+On the Virginia City Enterprise Mark learned from editor R. M. Daggett
+that "when it was necessary to call a man names, there were no expletives
+too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession to emphasize
+the utter want of character of the man assailed....  There were
+typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would have
+frightened a Bengal tiger.  The news editor could damn a mutilated
+dispatch in twenty-four languages."
+
+In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark Twain
+and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "The Doleful
+Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollected erotica.
+One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to find his room-mate
+standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big
+revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement," relates Paine in
+his Biography.
+
+"'Come here, Steve,' he said.  'I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead
+on him.'
+
+"'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him.  Just swear at him.  You can easily
+kill him at any range with your profanity.'
+
+"Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeing
+blast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexican hairless
+dog."
+
+Nor did Mark's "geysers of profanity" cease spouting after these gay and
+youthful days in San Francisco.  With Clemens it may truly be said that
+profanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.
+
+"It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts," recalled Katy Leary,
+life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, "and he'd swear
+something terrible if I didn't.  If he found a shirt in his drawer
+without a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer and
+throw them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of the bathroom
+window they'd go.  I used to look out every morning to see the
+snowflakes--anything white.  Out they'd fly....  Oh! he'd swear at
+anything when he was on a rampage.  He'd swear at his razor if it didn't
+cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
+sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter.  Well, I'd go and
+knock; I'd say, 'Mrs.  Clemens wants to know what's the matter.'  And
+then he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me
+Katy?'  'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.'  Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he
+was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs.
+Clemens hated swearing."  But his swearing never seemed really bad to
+Katy Leary, "It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said.
+"Sort of amusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore
+like an angel."
+
+In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
+billiards.  "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
+Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace.  "He loved the game,
+and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then
+the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more
+youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort.  Gently,
+slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
+they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
+stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."
+
+Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself.  In Paris, in his
+appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
+Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
+of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found
+its way into published literature." It is rumored to have been called
+"Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."
+
+In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W.  Fisher to accompany him on an exploration
+of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned that
+Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secret treasure
+chests for the famous visitor.  One of these guarded treasures was a
+volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to Frederick the
+Great.  "Too much is enough," Mark is reported to have said, when Fisher
+translated some of the verses, "I would blush to remember any of these
+stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna."
+When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him Mark put it into his
+pocket, saying, "Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is so busy mispronouncing
+German these days she can't even attempt to get at this."
+
+In his letters, too, Howells observed, "He had the Southwestern, the
+Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one
+ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was
+often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he
+had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear
+to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
+look at them.  I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that
+in it he was Shakespearean."
+
+          "With a nigger squat on her safety-valve"
+                         John Hay, Pike County Ballads.
+
+"Is there any other explanation," asks Van Wyck Brooks, "'of his
+Elizabethan breadth of parlance?'  Mr.  Howells confesses that he
+sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,
+to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not
+bear to reread.  Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,
+while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing out in
+an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having
+'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.'  Mark Twain's verbal
+Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not
+having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left
+thereto ferment.  No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of
+forbidden words.  Consider the famous book, 1601, that fireside
+conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsolete verbal
+indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly
+resurrected and assembled there?  He, whose blood was in constant ferment
+and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for
+him the roitous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve,
+and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the
+waste of a priceless psychic material!"  Thus, Brooks lumps 1601 with
+Mark Twain's "bawdry," and interprets it simply as another indication of
+frustration.
+
+
+FIGS FOR FIG LEAVES!
+
+Of course, the writing of such a piece as 1601 raised the question of
+freedom of expression for the creative artist.
+
+Although little discussed at that time, it was a question which intensely
+interested Mark, and for a fuller appreciation of Mark's position one
+must keep in mind the year in which 1601 was written, 1876.  There had
+been nothing like it before in American literature; there had appeared no
+Caldwells, no Faulkners, no Hemingways.  Victorian England was gushing
+Tennyson.  In the United States polite letters was a cult of the Brahmins
+of Boston, with William Dean Howells at the helm of the Atlantic.  Louisa
+May Alcott published Little Women in 1868-69, and Little Men in 1871.  In
+1873 Mark Twain led the van of the debunkers, scraping the gilt off the
+lily in the Gilded Age.
+
+In 1880 Mark took a few pot shots at license in Art and Literature in his
+Tramp Abroad, "I wonder why some things are?  For instance, Art is
+allowed as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times--but the
+privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed
+within the past eighty or ninety years.  Fielding and Smollet could
+portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have
+plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed
+to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.
+But not so with Art.  The brush may still deal freely with any subject;
+however revolting or indelicate.  It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every
+pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation has
+been doing with the statues.  These works, which had stood in innocent
+nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now.  Yes, every one of them.
+Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help noticing
+it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous.  But the comical thing
+about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid
+marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and
+ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blooded paintings which do
+really need it have in no case been furnished with it.
+
+"At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues of
+a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated grime--they
+hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures have been
+thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious
+generation.  You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery
+that exists in the world....  and there, against the wall, without
+obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the
+vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus.  It
+isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is the
+attitude of one of her arms and hand.  If I ventured to describe the
+attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for
+anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,
+for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges.  I saw young girls
+stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly
+at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic
+interest.  How I should like to describe her--just to see what a holy
+indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the unreflecting
+average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all
+that.
+
+"In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage,
+oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerable suffering--
+pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful
+detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and
+publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for they are innocent,
+they are inoffensive, being works of art.  But suppose a literary artist
+ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of
+these grisly things--the critics would skin him alive.  Well, let it go,
+it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost
+hers.  Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the
+consistencies of it--I haven't got time."
+
+
+PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY
+
+Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor Edward
+Wagenknecht as "the most famous piece of pornography in American
+literature."  Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like the little
+boy who is shocked to see "naughty" words chalked on the back fence,
+and thinks they are pornography.  The initiated, after years of wading
+through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant difference
+between filthy filth and funny "filth."  Dirt for dirt's sake is
+something else again.  Pornography, an eminent American jurist has
+pointed out, is distinguished by the "leer of the sensualist."
+
+"The words which are criticised as dirty," observed justice John M.
+Woolsey in the United States District Court of New York, lifting the ban
+on Ulysses by James Joyce, "are old Saxon words known to almost all men
+and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally
+and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical
+and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe."  Neither was there
+"pornographic intent," according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulysses
+obscene within the legal definition of that word.
+
+"The meaning of the word 'obscene,'" the Justice indicated, "as legally
+defined by the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to
+sexually impure and lustful thoughts.
+
+"Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and
+thoughts must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on a
+person with average sex instincts--what the French would call 'l'homme
+moyen sensuel'--who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role
+of hypothetical reagent as does the 'reasonable man' in the law of torts
+and 'the learned man in the art' on questions of invention in patent
+law."
+
+Obviously, it is ridiculous to say that the "leer of the sensualist"
+lurks in the pages of Mark Twain's 1601.
+
+
+DROLL STORY
+
+"In a way," observed William Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's whole
+works what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's.  It is better than the
+privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed,
+an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in
+the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from
+Shakespeare's urn.  It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say,
+from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of Hardy's books.  And, though
+it be filthy, it yet hath a splendor of mere animalism of good spirits...
+I would say it is scatalogical rather than erotic, save for one touch
+toward the end.  Indeed, it seems more of Rabelais than of Boccaccio or
+Masuccio or Aretino--is brutally British rather than lasciviously
+latinate, as to the subjects, but sumptuous as regards the language."
+
+Immediately upon first reading, John Hay, later Secretary of State, had
+proclaimed 1601 a masterpiece.  Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's
+biographer, likewise acknowledged its greatness, when he said, "1601 is a
+genuine classic, as classics of that sort go.  It is better than the
+gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps in some day to come, the taste
+that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary
+refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of Mark
+Twain.  Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of
+environment and point of view."
+
+"It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not," wrote
+Clemens in his notebook in 1879.  "I built a conversation which could
+have happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601.  I sent
+it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the
+sender!"
+
+But that man was a praiser of Rabelais and had been saying, 'O that we
+had a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one.
+
+"Then I took it to one of the greatest, best and most learned of Divines
+[Rev. Joseph H. Twichell] and read it to him.  He came within an ace of
+killing himself with laughter (for between you and me the thing was
+dreadfully funny.  I don't often write anything that I laugh at myself,
+but I can hardly think of that thing without laughing).  That old Divine
+said it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art--and David Gray of
+the Buffalo Courier said it ought to be printed privately and left behind
+me when I died, and then my fame as a literary artist would last."
+
+FRANKLIN J. MEINE
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST PRINTING
+     Verbatim Reprint
+
+
+[Date, 1601.]
+
+CONVERSATION, AS IT WAS BY THE SOCIAL FIRESIDE, IN THE TIME OF THE
+TUDORS.
+
+[Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the
+Pepys of that day, the same being Queen Elizabeth's cup-bearer.  He is
+supposed to be of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these
+literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath, to see the queen
+stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels that his nobility
+is defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay
+there till her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.]
+
+
+
+YESTERNIGHT
+toke her maiste ye queene a fantasie such as she sometimes hath, and had
+to her closet certain that doe write playes, bokes, and such like, these
+being my lord Bacon, his worship Sir Walter Ralegh, Mr. Ben Jonson, and
+ye child Francis Beaumonte, which being but sixteen, hath yet turned his
+hand to ye doing of ye Lattin masters into our Englishe tong, with grete
+discretion and much applaus.  Also came with these ye famous Shaxpur.  A
+righte straunge mixing truly of mighty blode with mean, ye more in
+especial since ye queenes grace was present, as likewise these following,
+to wit: Ye Duchess of Bilgewater, twenty-two yeres of age; ye Countesse
+of Granby, twenty-six; her doter, ye Lady Helen, fifteen; as also these
+two maides of honor, to-wit, ye Lady Margery Boothy, sixty-five, and ye
+Lady Alice Dilberry, turned seventy, she being two yeres ye queenes
+graces elder.
+
+I being her maites cup-bearer, had no choice but to remaine and beholde
+rank forgot, and ye high holde converse wh ye low as uppon equal termes,
+a grete scandal did ye world heare thereof.
+
+In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an
+exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore,
+and then--
+
+Ye Queene.--Verily in mine eight and sixty yeres have I not heard the
+fellow to this fart.  Meseemeth, by ye grete sound and clamour of it, it
+was male; yet ye belly it did lurk behinde shoulde now fall lean and flat
+against ye spine of him yt hath bene delivered of so stately and so waste
+a bulk, where as ye guts of them yt doe quiff-splitters bear, stand
+comely still and rounde.  Prithee let ye author confess ye offspring.
+Will my Lady Alice testify?
+
+Lady Alice.--Good your grace, an' I had room for such a thundergust
+within mine ancient bowels, 'tis not in reason I coulde discharge ye same
+and live to thank God for yt He did choose handmaid so humble whereby to
+shew his power.  Nay, 'tis not I yt have broughte forth this rich
+o'ermastering fog, this fragrant gloom, so pray you seeke ye further.
+
+Ye Queene.--Mayhap ye Lady Margery hath done ye companie this favor?
+
+Lady Margery.--So please you madam, my limbs are feeble wh ye weighte and
+drouth of five and sixty winters, and it behoveth yt I be tender unto
+them.  In ye good providence of God, an' I had contained this wonder,
+forsoothe wolde I have gi'en 'ye whole evening of my sinking life to ye
+dribbling of it forth, with trembling and uneasy soul, not launched it
+sudden in its matchless might, taking mine own life with violence,
+rending my weak frame like rotten rags.  It was not I, your maisty.
+
+Ye Queene.--O' God's name, who hath favored us?  Hath it come to pass yt
+a fart shall fart itself?  Not such a one as this, I trow.  Young Master
+Beaumont--but no; 'twould have wafted him to heaven like down of goose's
+boddy.  'Twas not ye little Lady Helen--nay, ne'er blush, my child;
+thoul't tickle thy tender maidenhedde with many a mousie-squeak before
+thou learnest to blow a harricane like this.  Wasn't you, my learned and
+ingenious Jonson?
+
+Jonson.--So fell a blast hath ne'er mine ears saluted, nor yet a stench
+so all-pervading and immortal.  'Twas not a novice did it, good your
+maisty, but one of veteran experience--else hadde he failed of
+confidence.  In sooth it was not I.
+
+Ye Queene.--My lord Bacon?
+
+Lord Bacon.-Not from my leane entrailes hath this prodigy burst forth, so
+please your grace.  Naught doth so befit ye grete as grete performance;
+and haply shall ye finde yt 'tis not from mediocrity this miracle hath
+issued.
+
+[Tho' ye subjoct be but a fart, yet will this tedious sink of learning
+pondrously phillosophize.  Meantime did the foul and deadly stink pervade
+all places to that degree, yt never smelt I ye like, yet dare I not to
+leave ye presence, albeit I was like to suffocate.]
+
+Ye Queene.--What saith ye worshipful Master Shaxpur?
+
+Shaxpur.--In the great hand of God I stand and so proclaim mine
+innocence.  Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of
+this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its
+quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement
+in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit
+itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook
+the globe in admiration of it.
+
+[Then was there a silence, and each did turn him toward the worshipful
+Sr Walter Ralegh, that browned, embattled, bloody swashbuckler, who
+rising up did smile, and simpering say,]
+
+Sr W.--Most gracious maisty, 'twas I that did it, but indeed it was so
+poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am wont to furnish, yt in
+sooth I was ashamed to call the weakling mine in so august a presence.
+It was nothing--less than nothing, madam--I did it but to clear my nether
+throat; but had I come prepared, then had I delivered something worthy.
+Bear with me, please your grace, till I can make amends.
+
+[Then delivered he himself of such a godless and rock-shivering blast
+that all were fain to stop their ears, and following it did come so dense
+and foul a stink that that which went before did seem a poor and trifling
+thing beside it.  Then saith he, feigning that he blushed and was
+confused, I perceive that I am weak to-day, and cannot justice do unto my
+powers; and sat him down as who should say, There, it is not much yet he
+that hath an arse to spare, let him fellow that, an' he think he can.  By
+God, an' I were ye queene, I would e'en tip this swaggering braggart out
+o' the court, and let him air his grandeurs and break his intolerable
+wind before ye deaf and such as suffocation pleaseth.]
+
+Then fell they to talk about ye manners and customs of many peoples, and
+Master Shaxpur spake of ye boke of ye sieur Michael de Montaine, wherein
+was mention of ye custom of widows of Perigord to wear uppon ye
+headdress, in sign of widowhood, a jewel in ye similitude of a man's
+member wilted and limber, whereat ye queene did laugh and say widows in
+England doe wear prickes too, but betwixt the thighs, and not wilted
+neither, till coition hath done that office for them.  Master Shaxpur did
+likewise observe how yt ye sieur de Montaine hath also spoken of a
+certain emperor of such mighty prowess that he did take ten maidenheddes
+in ye compass of a single night, ye while his empress did entertain two
+and twenty lusty knights between her sheetes, yet was not satisfied;
+whereat ye merrie Countess Granby saith a ram is yet ye emperor's
+superior, sith he wil tup above a hundred yewes 'twixt sun and sun; and
+after, if he can have none more to shag, will masturbate until he hath
+enrich'd whole acres with his seed.
+
+Then spake ye damned windmill, Sr Walter, of a people in ye uttermost
+parts of America, yt capulate not until they be five and thirty yeres of
+age, ye women being eight and twenty, and do it then but once in seven
+yeres.
+
+Ye Queene.--How doth that like my little Lady Helen?  Shall we send thee
+thither and preserve thy belly?
+
+Lady Helen.--Please your highnesses grace, mine old nurse hath told me
+there are more ways of serving God than by locking the thighs together;
+yet am I willing to serve him yt way too, sith your highnesses grace hath
+set ye ensample.
+
+Ye Queene.--God' wowndes a good answer, childe.
+
+Lady Alice.--Mayhap 'twill weaken when ye hair sprouts below ye navel.
+
+Lady Helen.--Nay, it sprouted two yeres syne; I can scarce more than
+cover it with my hand now.
+
+Ye Queene.--Hear Ye that, my little Beaumonte?  Have ye not a little
+birde about ye that stirs at hearing tell of so sweete a neste?
+
+Beaumonte.--'Tis not insensible, illustrious madam; but mousing owls and
+bats of low degree may not aspire to bliss so whelming and ecstatic as is
+found in ye downy nests of birdes of Paradise.
+
+Ye Queene.--By ye gullet of God, 'tis a neat-turned compliment.  With
+such a tongue as thine, lad, thou'lt spread the ivory thighs of many a
+willing maide in thy good time, an' thy cod-piece be as handy as thy
+speeche.
+
+Then spake ye queene of how she met old Rabelais when she was turned of
+fifteen, and he did tell her of a man his father knew that had a double
+pair of bollocks, whereon a controversy followed as concerning the most
+just way to spell the word, ye contention running high betwixt ye learned
+Bacon and ye ingenious Jonson, until at last ye old Lady Margery,
+wearying of it all, saith, 'Gentles, what mattereth it how ye shall spell
+the word?  I warrant Ye when ye use your bollocks ye shall not think of
+it; and my Lady Granby, be ye content; let the spelling be, ye shall
+enjoy the beating of them on your buttocks just the same, I trow.  Before
+I had gained my fourteenth year I had learnt that them that would explore
+a cunt stop'd not to consider the spelling o't.'
+
+Sr W.--In sooth, when a shift's turned up, delay is meet for naught but
+dalliance.  Boccaccio hath a story of a priest that did beguile a maid
+into his cell, then knelt him in a corner to pray for grace to be rightly
+thankful for this tender maidenhead ye Lord had sent him; but ye abbot,
+spying through ye key-hole, did see a tuft of brownish hair with fair
+white flesh about it, wherefore when ye priest's prayer was done, his
+chance was gone, forasmuch as ye little maid had but ye one cunt, and
+that was already occupied to her content.
+
+Then conversed they of religion, and ye mightie work ye old dead Luther
+did doe by ye grace of God.  Then next about poetry, and Master Shaxpur
+did rede a part of his King Henry IV., ye which, it seemeth unto me,
+is not of ye value of an arsefull of ashes, yet they praised it bravely,
+one and all.
+
+Ye same did rede a portion of his "Venus and Adonis," to their prodigious
+admiration, whereas I, being sleepy and fatigued withal, did deme it but
+paltry stuff, and was the more discomforted in that ye blody bucanier had
+got his wind again, and did turn his mind to farting with such villain
+zeal that presently I was like to choke once more.  God damn this windy
+ruffian and all his breed.  I wolde that hell mighte get him.
+
+They talked about ye wonderful defense which old Sr. Nicholas Throgmorton
+did make for himself before ye judges in ye time of Mary; which was
+unlucky matter to broach, sith it fetched out ye quene with a 'Pity yt
+he, having so much wit, had yet not enough to save his doter's
+maidenhedde sound for her marriage-bed.'  And ye quene did give ye damn'd
+Sr. Walter a look yt made hym wince--for she hath not forgot he was her
+own lover it yt olde day.  There was silent uncomfortableness now; 'twas
+not a good turn for talk to take, sith if ye queene must find offense in
+a little harmless debauching, when pricks were stiff and cunts not loathe
+to take ye stiffness out of them, who of this company was sinless;
+behold, was not ye wife of Master Shaxpur four months gone with child
+when she stood uppe before ye altar?  Was not her Grace of Bilgewater
+roger'd by four lords before she had a husband?  Was not ye little Lady
+Helen born on her mother's wedding-day?  And, beholde, were not ye Lady
+Alice and ye Lady Margery there, mouthing religion, whores from ye
+cradle?
+
+In time came they to discourse of Cervantes, and of the new painter,
+Rubens, that is beginning to be heard of.  Fine words and dainty-wrought
+phrases from the ladies now, one or two of them being, in other days,
+pupils of that poor ass, Lille, himself; and I marked how that Jonson and
+Shaxpur did fidget to discharge some venom of sarcasm, yet dared they not
+in the presence, the queene's grace being ye very flower of ye Euphuists
+herself.  But behold, these be they yt, having a specialty, and admiring
+it in themselves, be jealous when a neighbor doth essaye it, nor can
+abide it in them long.  Wherefore 'twas observable yt ye quene waxed
+uncontent; and in time labor'd grandiose speeche out of ye mouth of Lady
+Alice, who manifestly did mightily pride herself thereon, did quite
+exhauste ye quene's endurance, who listened till ye gaudy speeche was
+done, then lifted up her brows, and with vaste irony, mincing saith 'O
+shit!' Whereat they alle did laffe, but not ye Lady Alice, yt olde
+foolish bitche.
+
+Now was Sr. Walter minded of a tale he once did hear ye ingenious
+Margrette of Navarre relate, about a maid, which being like to suffer
+rape by an olde archbishoppe, did smartly contrive a device to save her
+maidenhedde, and said to him, First, my lord, I prithee, take out thy
+holy tool and piss before me; which doing, lo his member felle, and would
+not rise again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               FOOTNOTES
+                              To Frivolity
+
+The historical consistency of 1601 indicates that Twain must have given
+the subject considerable thought.  The author was careful to speak only
+of men who conceivably might have been in the Virgin Queen's closet and
+engaged in discourse with her.
+
+
+THE CHARACTERS
+
+At this time (1601) Queen Elizabeth was 68 years old.  She speaks of
+having talked to "old Rabelais" in her youth.  This might have been
+possible as Rabelais died in 1552, when the Queen was 19 years old.
+
+Among those in the party were Shakespeare, at that time 37 years old; Ben
+Jonson, 27; and Sir Walter Raleigh, 49.  Beaumont at the time was 17, not
+16.  He was admitted as a member of the Inner Temple in 1600, and his
+first translations, those from Ovid, were first published in 1602.
+Therefore, if one were holding strictly to the year date, neither by age
+nor by fame would Beaumont have been eligible to attend such a gathering
+of august personages in the year 1601; but the point is unimportant.
+
+
+THE ELIZABETHAN WRITERS
+
+In the Conversation Shakespeare speaks of Montaigne's Essays.  These were
+first published in 1580 and successive editions were issued in the years
+following, the third volume being published in 1588.  "In England
+Montaigne was early popular.  It was long supposed that the autograph of
+Shakespeare in a copy of Florio's translation showed his study of the
+Essays.  The autograph has been disputed, but divers passages, and
+especially one in The Tempest, show that at first or second hand the poet
+was acquainted with the essayist." (Encyclopedia Brittanica.)
+
+The company at the Queen's fireside discoursed of Lilly (or Lyly),
+English dramatist and novelist of the Elizabethan era, whose novel,
+Euphues, published in two parts, 'Euphues', or the 'Anatomy of Wit'
+(1579) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580) was a literary sensation.
+It is said to have influenced literary style for more than a quarter of a
+century, and traces of its influence are found in Shakespeare.  (Columbia
+Encyclopedia).
+
+The introduction of Ben Jonson into the party was wholly appropriate,
+if one may call to witness some of Jonson's writings.  The subject under
+discussion was one that Jonson was acquainted with, in The Alchemist:
+
+
+Act. I, Scene I,
+
+FACE:  Believe't I will.
+
+SUBTLE:  Thy worst.  I fart at thee.
+
+DOL COMMON:  Have you your wits?  Why, gentlemen, for love----
+
+
+Act. 2, Scene I,
+
+SIR EPICURE MAMMON: ....and then my poets, the same that writ so subtly
+of the fart, whom I shall entertain still for that subject and again in
+Bartholomew Fair
+
+NIGHTENGALE: (sings a ballad)
+     Hear for your love, and buy for your money.
+     A delicate ballad o' the ferret and the coney.
+     A preservative again' the punk's evil.
+     Another goose-green starch, and the devil.
+     A dozen of divine points, and the godly garter
+     The fairing of good counsel, of an ell and three-quarters.
+     What is't you buy?
+     The windmill blown down by the witche's fart,
+     Or Saint George, that, O! did break the dragon's heart.
+
+
+GOOD OLD ENGLISH CUSTOM
+
+That certain types of English society have not changed materially in
+their freedom toward breaking wind in public can be noticed in some
+comparatively recent literature.  Frank Harris in My Life, Vol. 2,
+Ch. XIII, tells of Lady Marriott, wife of a judge Advocate General,
+being compelled to leave her own table, at which she was entertaining Sir
+Robert Fowler, then the Lord Mayor of London, because of the suffocating
+and nauseating odors there.  He also tells of an instance in parliament,
+and of a rather brilliant bon mot spoken upon that occasion.
+
+"While Fowler was speaking Finch-Hatton had shewn signs of restlessness;
+towards the end of the speech he had moved some three yards away from the
+Baronet.  As soon as Fowler sat down Finch-Hatton sprang up holding his
+handkerchief to his nose:
+
+"'Mr. Speaker,' he began, and was at once acknowledged by the Speaker,
+for it was a maiden speech, and as such was entitled to precedence by the
+courteous custom of the House, 'I know why the Right Honourable Member
+from the City did not conclude his speech with a proposal.  The only way
+to conclude such a speech appropriately would be with a motion!'"
+
+
+AEOLIAN CREPITATIONS
+
+But society had apparently degenerated sadly in modern times, and even in
+the era of Elizabeth, for at an earlier date it was a serious--nay,
+capital--offense to break wind in the presence of majesty.  The Emperor
+Claudius, hearing that one who had suppressed the urge while paying him
+court had suffered greatly thereby, "intended to issue an edict, allowing
+to all people the liberty of giving vent at table to any distension
+occasioned by flatulence:"
+
+Martial, too (Book XII, Epigram LXXVII), tells of the embarrassment of
+one who broke wind while praying in the Capitol,
+
+"One day, while standing upright, addressing his prayers to Jupiter,
+Aethon farted in the Capitol.  Men laughed, but the Father of the Gods,
+offended, condemned the guilty one to dine at home for three nights.
+Since that time, miserable Aethon, when he wishes to enter the Capitol,
+goes first to Paterclius' privies and farts ten or twenty times.  Yet, in
+spite of this precautionary crepitation, he salutes Jove with constricted
+buttocks."  Martial also (Book IV, Epigram LXXX), ridicules a woman who
+was subject to the habit, saying,
+
+"Your Bassa, Fabullus, has always a child at her side, calling it her
+darling and her plaything; and yet--more wonder--she does not care for
+children.  What is the reason then.  Bassa is apt to fart.  (For which
+she could blame the unsuspecting infant.)"
+
+The tale is told, too, of a certain woman who performed an aeolian
+crepitation at a dinner attended by the witty Monsignieur Dupanloup,
+Bishop of Orleans, and that when, to cover up her lapse, she began to
+scrape her feet upon the floor, and to make similar noises, the Bishop
+said, "Do not trouble to find a rhyme, Madam!"
+
+Nay, worthier names than those of any yet mentioned have discussed the
+matter.  Herodotus tells of one such which was the precursor to the fall
+of an empire and a change of dynasty--that which Amasis discharges while
+on horseback, and bids the envoy of Apries, King of Egypt, catch and
+deliver to his royal master.  Even the exact manner and posture of
+Amasis, author of this insult, is described.
+
+St. Augustine (The City of God, XIV:24) cites the instance of a man who
+could command his rear trumpet to sound at will, which his learned
+commentator fortifies with the example of one who could do so in tune!
+
+Benjamin Franklin, in his "Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels" has
+canvassed suggested remedies for alleviating the stench attendant upon
+these discharges:
+
+"My Prize Question therefore should be:  To discover some Drug, wholesome
+and--not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that
+shall render the natural discharges of Wind from our Bodies not only
+inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes.
+
+"That this is not a Chimerical Project & altogether impossible, may
+appear from these considerations.  That we already have some knowledge of
+means capable of varying that smell.  He that dines on stale Flesh,
+especially with much Addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a stink
+that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some time on
+Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible of
+the most delicate Noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the Report,
+he may anywhere give vent to his Griefs, unnoticed.  But as there are
+many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, & as a
+little quick Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity
+of fetid Air arising from the vast Mass of putrid Matter contained in
+such Places, and render it pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a
+little Powder of Lime (or some other equivalent) taken in our Food, or
+perhaps a Glass of Lime Water drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect
+on the Air produced in and issuing from our Bowels?"
+
+One curious commentary on the text is that Elizabeth should be so fond of
+investigating into the authorship of the exhalation in question, when she
+was inordinately fond of strong and sweet perfumes; in fact, she was
+responsible for the tremendous increase in importations of scents into
+England during her reign.
+
+
+"YE BOKE OF YE SIEUR MICHAEL DE MONTAINE"
+
+There is a curious admixture of error and misunderstanding in this part
+of the sketch.  In the first place, the story is borrowed from Montaigne,
+where it is told inaccurately, and then further corrupted in the telling.
+
+It was not the good widows of Perigord who wore the phallus upon their
+coifs; it was the young married women, of the district near Montaigne's
+home, who paraded it to view upon their foreheads, as a symbol, says our
+essayist, "of the joy they derived therefrom." If they became widows,
+they reversed its position, and covered it up with the rest of their
+head-dress.
+
+The "emperor" mentioned was not an emperor; he was Procolus, a native of
+Albengue, on the Genoese coast, who, with Bonosus, led the unsuccessful
+rebellion in Gaul against Emperor Probus.  Even so keen a commentator as
+Cotton has failed to note the error.
+
+The empress (Montaigne does not say "his empress") was Messalina, third
+wife of the Emperor Claudius, who was uncle of Caligula and foster-father
+to Nero.  Furthermore, in her case the charge is that she copulated with
+twenty-five in a single night, and not twenty-two, as appears in the
+text.  Montaigne is right in his statistics, if original sources are
+correct, whereas the author erred in transcribing the incident.
+
+As for Proculus, it has been noted that he was associated with Bonosus,
+who was as renowned in the field of Bacchus as was Proculus in that of
+Venus (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).  The feat of
+Proculus is told in his own words, in Vopiscus, (Hist. Augustine, p. 246)
+where he recounts having captured one hundred Sarmatian virgins, and
+unmaidened ten of them in one night, together with the happenings
+subsequent thereto.
+
+Concerning Messalina, there appears to be no question but that she was a
+nymphomaniac, and that, while Empress of Rome, she participated in some
+fearful debaucheries.  The question is what to believe, for much that we
+have heard about her is almost certainly apocryphal.
+
+The author from whom Montaigne took his facts is the elder Pliny, who,
+in his Natural History, Book X, Chapter 83, says, "Other animals become
+sated with veneral pleasures; man hardly knows any satiety.  Messalina,
+the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an
+empress, selected for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the
+most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute;
+and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day,
+at the twenty-fifth embrace."
+
+But Pliny, notwithstanding his great attainments, was often a retailer of
+stale gossip, and in like case was Aurelius Victor, another writer who
+heaped much odium on her name.  Again, there is a great hiatus in the
+Annals of Tacitus, a true historian, at the period covering the earlier
+days of the Empress; while Suetonius, bitter as he may be, is little more
+than an anecdotist.  Juvenal, another of her detractors, is a prejudiced
+witness, for he started out to satirize female vice, and naturally aimed
+at high places.  Dio also tells of Messalina's misdeeds, but his work is
+under the same limitations as that of Suetonius.  Furthermore, none but
+Pliny mentions the excess under consideration.
+
+However, "where there is much smoke there must be a little fire," and
+based upon the superimposed testimony of the writers of the period, there
+appears little doubt but that Messalina was a nymphomaniac, that she
+prostituted herself in the public stews, naked, and with gilded nipples,
+and that she did actually marry her chief adulterer, Silius, while
+Claudius was absent at Ostia, and that the wedding was consummated in the
+presence of a concourse of witnesses.  This was "the straw that broke the
+camel's back."  Claudius hastened back to Rome, Silius was dispatched,
+and Messalina, lacking the will-power to destroy herself, was killed when
+an officer ran a sword through her abdomen, just as it appeared that
+Claudius was about to relent.
+
+
+"THEN SPAKE YE DAMNED WINDMILL, SIR WALTER"
+
+Raleigh is thoroughly in character here; this observation is quite in
+keeping with the general veracity of his account of his travels in
+Guiana, one of the most mendacious accounts of adventure ever told.
+Naturally, the scholarly researches of Westermarck have failed to
+discover this people; perhaps Lady Helen might best be protected among
+the Jibaros of Ecuador, where the men marry when approaching forty.
+
+Ben Jonson in his Conversations observed "That Sr. W. Raughlye esteemed
+more of fame than of conscience."
+
+
+YE VIRGIN QUEENE
+
+Grave historians have debated for centuries the pretensions of Elizabeth
+to the title, "The Virgin Queen," and it is utterly impossible to dispose
+of the issue in a note.  However, the weight of opinion appears to be in
+the negative.  Many and great were the difficulties attending the
+marriage of a Protestant princess in those troublous times, and Elizabeth
+finally announced that she would become wedded to the English nation,
+and she wore a ring in token thereof until her death.  However, more or
+less open liaisons with Essex and Leicester, as well as a host of lesser
+courtiers, her ardent temperament, and her imperious temper, are
+indications that cannot be denied in determining any estimate upon the
+point in question.
+
+Ben Jonson in his Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden
+says,
+
+"Queen Elizabeth never saw herself after she became old in a true glass;
+they painted her, and sometymes would vermillion her nose.  She had
+allwayes about Christmass evens set dice that threw sixes or five, and
+she knew not they were other, to make her win and esteame herself
+fortunate.  That she had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of
+man, though for her delight she tried many.  At the comming over of
+Monsieur, there was a French Chirurgion who took in hand to cut it, yett
+fear stayed her, and his death."
+
+It was a subject which again intrigued Clemens when he was abroad with
+W. H. Fisher, whom Mark employed to "nose up" everything pertaining to
+Queen Elizabeth's manly character.
+
+
+"'BOCCACCIO HATH A STORY"
+
+The author does not pay any great compliment to Raleigh's memory here.
+There is no such tale in all Boccaccio.  The nearest related incident
+forms the subject matter of Dineo's novel (the fourth) of the First day
+of the Decameron.
+
+
+OLD SR. NICHOLAS THROGMORTON
+
+The incident referred to appears to be Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's trial
+for complicity in the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen of England,
+a charge of which he was acquitted.  This so angered Queen Mary that she
+imprisoned him in the Tower, and fined the jurors from one to two
+thousand pounds each.  Her action terrified succeeding juries, so that
+Sir Nicholas's brother was condemned on no stronger evidence than that
+which had failed to prevail before.  While Sir Nicholas's defense may
+have been brilliant, it must be admitted that the evidence was weak.
+He was later released from the Tower, and under Elizabeth was one of a
+group of commissioners sent by that princess into Scotland, to foment
+trouble with Mary, Queen of Scots.  When the attempt became known,
+Elizabeth repudiated the acts of her agents, but Sir Nicholas, having
+anticipated this possibility, had sufficient foresight to secure
+endorsement of his plan by the Council, and so outwitted Elizabeth, who
+was playing a two-faced role, and Cecil, one of the greatest statesmen
+who ever held the post of principal minister.  Perhaps it was this
+incident to which the company referred, which might in part explain
+Elizabeth's rejoinder.  However, he had been restored to confidence ere
+this, and had served as ambassador to France.
+
+
+"TO SAVE HIS DOTER'S MAIDENHEDDE"
+
+Elizabeth Throckmorton (or Throgmorton), daughter of Sir Nicholas, was
+one of Elizabeth's maids of honor.  When it was learned that she had been
+debauched by Raleigh, Sir Walter was recalled from his command at sea by
+the Queen, and compelled to marry the girl.  This was not "in that olde
+daie," as the text has it, for it happened only eight years before the
+date of this purported "conversation," when Elizabeth was sixty years
+old.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+The various printings of 1601 reveal how Mark Twain's 'Fireside
+Conversation' has become a part of the American printer's lore.  But more
+important, its many printings indicate that it has become a popular bit
+of American folklore, particularly for men and women who have a feeling
+for Mark Twain.  Apparently it appeals to the typographer, who devotes to
+it his worthy art, as well as to the job printer, who may pull a crudely
+printed proof.  The gay procession of curious printings of 1601 is unique
+in the history of American printing.
+
+Indeed, the story of the various printings of 1601 is almost legendary.
+In the days of the "jour." printer, so I am told, well-thumbed copies
+were carried from print shop to print shop.  For more than a quarter
+century now it has been one of the chief sources of enjoyment for
+printers' devils; and many a young rascal has learned about life from
+this Fireside Conversation.  It has been printed all over the country,
+and if report is to be believed, in foreign countries as well.  Because
+of the many surreptitious and anonymous printings it is exceedingly
+difficult, if not impossible, to compile a complete bibliography.  Many
+printings lack the name of the publisher, the printer, the place or date
+of printing.  In many instances some of the data, through the patient
+questioning of fellow collectors, has been obtained and supplied.
+
+
+1.  [Date, 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the
+Time of the Tudors.
+
+DESCRIPTION: Pamphlet, pp. [ 1 ]-8, without wrappers or cover, measuring
+7x8 inches.  The title is Set in caps. and small caps.
+
+The excessively rare first printing, printed in Cleveland, 1880, at the
+instance of Alexander Gunn, friend of John Hay.  Only four copies are
+believed to have been printed, of which, it is said now, the only known
+copy is located in the Willard S. Morse collection.
+
+
+2.  Date 1601.  Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the
+time of the Tudors.
+
+(Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the
+Pepys of that day, the same being cup-bearer to Queen Elizabeth.  It is
+supposed that he is of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these
+literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath to see the Queen
+stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels his nobility
+defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay
+there till Her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.)
+
+DESCRIPTION: Title as above, verso blank; pp. [i]-xi, text; verso p. xi
+blank.  About 8 x 10 inches, printed on handmade linen paper soaked in
+weak coffee, wrappers.  The title is set in caps and small caps.
+
+COLOPHON: at the foot of p. xi: Done Att Ye Academie Preffe; M DCCC LXXX
+II.
+
+The privately printed West Point edition, the first printing of the text
+authorized by Mark Twain, of which but fifty copies were printed.  The
+story of this printing is fully told in the Introduction.
+
+
+3.  Conversation As It Was By The Social Fire-side In The Time Of The
+Tudors from Ye Diary of Ye Cupbearer to her Maisty Queen Elizabeth.
+[design] Imprinted by Ye Puritan Press At Ye Sign of Ye Jolly Virgin
+1601.
+
+DESCRIPTION: 2 blank leaves; p. [i] blank, p. [ii] fronds., p. [iii]
+title [as above], p. [iv] "Mem.", pp. 1-[25] text, I blank leaf.  4 3/4
+by 6 1/4 inches, printed in a modern version of the Caxton black letter
+type, on M.B.M.  French handmade paper.  The frontispiece, a woodcut by
+A. E. Curtis, is a portrait of the cup-bearer.  Bound in buff-grey
+boards, buckram back.  Cover title reads, in pale red ink, Caxton type,
+Conversation As It Was By The Social Fire-side In The Time Of The Tudors.
+[The Byway Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1901, 120 copies.]
+
+Probably the first published edition.
+
+Later, in 1916, a facsimile edition of this printing was published in
+Chicago from plates.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601
+by Mark Twain
+
diff --git a/old/mtsxn11.zip b/old/mtsxn11.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c89d520
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/mtsxn11.zip