22 March 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. ( MTL , 1:172, UCCL 00447)
I Ⓐemendationam not going to lecture any more forever. I have got things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it will cost us to live & Ⓐemendation I can make the money without lecturing. Therefore old man, count me out.1explanatory note
The Boston Lyceum Bureau’s promotional magazine for the 1870–71 lecture season, which appeared in July 1870, included the following notice (Lyceum 1870, 16):
Mark Twain.
“Mark Twain” (Mr. Clemens), we fear, must be numbered for a season among the Lost Stars of the Lyceum firmament.
The fate of Midas has overtaken this brilliant but unfortunate lecturer. He lectured—and made money; he edited—and made money; he wrote a book—and made money: and when a relative, under the guise of friendship, perpetrated “a first-class swindle” on him, he made a great deal of money by that. Even the income-tax collector has failed to soften the rigor of his fate. Under these disheartening circumstances, he cannot be made to see the necessity of lecturing:—
“Just for a vault full of silver he left us!”
For the “first-class swindle,” see pp. 45–49; for Clemens’s encounter with the tax collector, see 2 and 3 Mar 70 to Langdon, n. 5click to open link. Redpath and Fall’s closing quotation was a play on a line from Robert Browning’s “The Lost Leader”: “Just for a handful of silver he left us.”
References
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. [Volume numbers in citations are to this edition; page numbers are the same in all editions.] 1912
MTL , 1:172. The rationale for emendations to remove MTL styling is given in Description of Texts.
L4 , 94; In addition to the copytext, MTB , 1:409, with omissions.