Jump to Content

Add to My Citations To Benjamin P. Shillaber
28 May 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: IU-R, UCCL 00470)
Click to add citation to My Citations.

figure llc

Buffalo, May 28.

My Dear Shillaber—

Yourself & daughter must spare a moment to read my thanks for your hearty words & good wishes—& with mine go my wife’s with all her heart.1

I believe I am out of the lecture field & I tell you it is imperial luxury to believe it, too.

We are arranging to spend August & part of Sept in the Adirondacks—& I do hope we shall get a chance to see you all for a moment in Boston while we are wandering away from home. For I can kiss the book & hold up my hand & depose, with Nasby, that “I would rather be a lamp-post in Boston than Mayor of another town.”2

Yrs Sincerely

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

Explanatory Notes

Add to My Citations

Click to add citation to My Citations.
1 Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber (1814–90), printer, journalist at the Boston Post and other papers, humorist, and lecturer, was the creator of the loquacious Mrs. Partington, whose comical sayings and doings filled a series of popular books. He had founded a Boston weekly, the Carpet-Bag (1851–53), where Clemens published “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” in 1852 (ET&S1, 63–65). Probably in response to Clemens’s wedding cards, Shillaber had sent the following poem, which Clemens published in the Buffalo Express on 12 February 1870 (2):

Congratulatory.

[B. P. Shillaber (Mrs. Partington) discourses pleasantly and kindly concerning a late occurrence as follows:]

Dear brother of the happy pen,

Your card is just beneath my ken

Announcing that ’mongst married men

You’ve taken place:

Well, Heaven bless you, “but and ben,”

With fortune’s grace.

There’s none deserving more the prize

Of good that ‘long life’s pathway lies,

Lit by sweet smiles and sunny eyes,

Than you, my friend,

And o’er you may benignant skies

Forever bend.

The world to you a tribute brings,

And on your bridal altar flings,

Grateful and glad for myriad things

Your muse has lent,

And one grand epithalamium sings

O’er the event.


We’ve gloried in the race you’ve run,

We’ve gloried in the fame you’ve won

Ere yet your life’s meridian sun

Has gained its height,

Illuming by his rays of fun

A pathway bright.


And better far than all, dear Mark,

Thou’st found the matrimonial ark

In which the true who there embark

Find many a charm,

That prudence whispers those who hark

To save from harm.


And I, your latest friend, am fain

To pour my tributary strain,

In unpretending rhyming vein,

And thus appear,

Invoking blessing on the Twain,

With heart sincere.

Benny dicite,

Boston, February 7. em spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceem spaceB. P. S.

(The Buffalo Commercial Advertiser printed the poem the same day [“A Recent Wedding,” 3].) Shillaber’s “hearty words & good wishes” may have come in a recent letter or were possibly delivered by John W. Ryan, assistant editor of the Boston Gazette. On 1 May Shillaber wrote a letter of introduction for Ryan, asking Clemens to “Please receive him graciously for his sake, your sake and my sake” (CU-MARK; Boston Directory 1869, 535).

Add to My Citations

Click to add citation to My Citations.
2 Clemens had been in Boston twice with Nasby in 1869 (L3, 164, 169, 405–8). It is not known where or even whether Nasby published this remark about Boston.



glyphglyphSource text(s):glyph
MS, facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the Rare Book Room, University of Illinois, Urbana (IU-R).

glyphglyphPrevious publication:glyph L4, 142–144.

glyphglyphProvenance:glyphThe MS, in the Franklin J. Meine Collection, was probably among the Mark Twain materials purchased from Meine’s widow in 1969.