January 23, 1886 Saturday

January 23 Saturday – Ambrose Bierce’s short article in The Wasp (San Francisco) was a sneering discussion of Sam’s Jan. 18 speech at the Typothetae Dinner. Bierce felt Sam had lost his humor: “foremost among those desecrators of the tomb of Mark the Jester is Mark the Money-worm….”his last atrocious desecration” was the speech as reported by the Associated Press. “They should…have called it an epitaph, an affidavit, an indisputable proof that Samuel Clemens, Esquire, of Hartford, Connecticut was masquerading in the motley of Mark Twain…and that S. Clemens, Esq., was making a mighty poor fist of it” [Tenney, ALR supplement to the Reference Guide (Autumn, 1981) 162].