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$Unique_ID{bob01458}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Pudd'nhead Wilson
A Whisper To The Reader}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1905}
$Log{See Mark Twain*0145801.scf
}
Title: Pudd'nhead Wilson
Author: Twain, Mark
Date: 1905
A Whisper To The Reader
There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be
destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the
ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the
choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule
has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are
called an ass, we are left in doubt.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar.
A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I was
not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without first
subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by a trained
barrister - if that is what they are called. These chapters are right now
in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate eye of William
Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest Missouri thirty-five
years ago and then came over here to Florence for his health and is still
helping for exercise and board in Macaroni Vermicelli's horse-feed shed which
is up the back alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del
Duomo just beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six
hundred years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them
build Giotto's campanile and yet always got tired looking as soon as Beatrice
passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself
with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same
old stand where they sell the same old cake to this day and it is just as
light and good as it was then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it.
He was a little rusty on his law, but he rubbed up for this book, and those
two or three legal chapters are right and straight now. He told me so
himself.
Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893, at the Villa
Viviani, village of Settignano, three miles back of Florence, on the hills -
the same certainly affording the most charming view to be found on this
planet, and with it the most dreamlike and enchanting sunsets to be found in
any planet or even in any solar system - and given, too, in the swell room of
the house, with the busts of Cerretani senators and other grandees of this
line looking approvingly down upon me as they used to look down upon Dante,
and mutely asking me to adopt them into my family, which I do with pleasure,
for my remotest ancestors are but spring chickens compared with these robed
and stately antiques, and it will be a great and satisfying lift for me, that
six hundred years will.
Mark Twain.
[See Mark Twain: The Author]