NOTEBOOK

I disfavor capital punishment.

Sampson was a Jew—therefore not a fool. The Jews
have the best average brain of any people in the world.
The Jews are the only race who work wholly with their
brains and never with their hands. There are no Jew
beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew ditchers, hod-carriers,
day laborers or followers of toilsome, mechanical trade.
They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intel-
lectual aristocracy.

It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse
or not. Rabelais. I once wrote a conversation between
Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir
Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton
and a stupid, stupid old nobleman—this latter being cup-
bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk.
There were four maids of honor present, and a sweet
young girl two years younger than the boy Beaumont.
I built a conversation which could have happened—I used
words such as were used at that time—1601—I sent it
anonymously to a magazine—and how the editor abused
it and the sender. But that man was a praiser of Rabelais,
and had been saying "Oh, that we had a Rabelais.3' I
judged I could furnish him one.

Then I took it to one of the greatest, best and most
learned of Divines and read it to him. He came within
an ace of killing himself with laughter (for between you
and me the thing was dreadfully funny. I don't often write
anything that I laugh at myself, but I can hardly think
of that thing without laughing). That old Divine said
that it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art—and
David Gray of the Buffalo Courier said it ought to be
printed privately and left behind me when I died, and
then my fame as a literary artist would last.