Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred. We can鈥檛 have that: there鈥檚 enough of us already. If you go on widening and spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded that each man鈥檚 sacred things are the ONLY ones, and the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward them or suffer for it. That can surely happen, and when it happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent, and dictatorial word in the language. And people will say, Whose business is it what gods I worship and what things hold sacred? Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get that right?鈥�
So it has happened that the old timers鈥� who went to school with Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Becky and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad, after all. So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to get a Mark Twain鈥� story, all incidents being viewed in the light of his present fame, until the volume of Twainiana鈥� is already considerable and growing in proportion as the old timers鈥� drop away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their descendants. With some seventy-three years and living in a villa instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his works鈥� that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, I鈥檝e heard father tell,鈥� or possibly, Once when I.鈥� The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother 鈥� WAS my mother.