Our own Washington Irving writ quite a good verse, and so did the American Hackett—the best actor of some of Shakespeare’s characters.
Lots of actors have left their names in the room where the poet wuz born—Edmund Kean, Charles Kean, and a great many others. And in the visitors’ book you see writin’s from kings to chore-boys, and lines in every language—English, German, French, Chinese, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, etc., etc., etc.
The Poet of the World has the world come to do honor to his memory.
Next to the thought that I wuz under the ruff that bent over the head of Shakespeare wuz to see the writin’ of some who had writ their names on the low walls.
Charles Dickens! Why, jest to look on that one name, writ by his own hand, would have been enough, if I had been to home, to furnished me with deep emotions for ten days. Nobody knows what my feelin’s have always been for that man.
It hain’t quite so fashionable to love Dickens now as it ust to be. The world has grown older and more genteel, and seems to prize more the writin’s it can’t understand—the vaguer ones and more cross like, and morbid, “Is Life Worth Living”—“No, it hain’t.”
“How to be Happy though Married.”
Ibsen, Tolstoi, etc., etc., etc., and so forth and so on.
But I lay out to like Dickens till, like Barkis, the high water comes, and—“I go out with the tide.”
So his name, the Master, I laid my hand on’t, and had ninety-seven emotions durin’ that time, and I presoom more, though truly I didn’t count ’em.