my name, and that this
conduct of mine was a grave fraud upon the people. The "Graphic" was not
an authority upon any subject whatever. It had a sort of distinction, in
that it was the first and only illustrated daily newspaper that the
world had seen; but it was without character; it was poorly and cheaply
edited; its opinion of a book or of any other work of art was of no
consequence. Everybody knew this, yet all the critics in America, one
after the other, copied the "Graphic's" criticism, merely changing the
phraseology, and left me under that charge of dishonest conduct. Even
the great Chicago "Tribune," the most important journal in the Middle
West, was not able to invent anything fresh, but adopted the view of the
humble "Daily Graphic," dishonesty-charge and all.

However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and
missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the
burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself.
But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a
crime, and I am not unused to that.

What I have been travelling toward all this time is this: the first
critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance
littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose
aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly
unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers,
and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems
strange to me that apparently no critic in the country could be found
who could look at me and have the courage to take up his pen and destroy
that lie. That lie began its course on the Pacific coast, in 1864, and
it likened me in personal appearance to Petroleum V. Nasby, who had been
out there lecturing. For twenty-five years afterward, no critic could
furnish a description of me without fetching in Nasby to help out my
portrait. I knew Nasby well, and he was a good fellow, but in my life I
have not felt malignant enough about any more than three persons to
charge those persons with resembling Nasby. It hurts me to the heart. I
was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it. And it
had long been a distress to my family--including Susy--that the critics
should go on making this wearisome mistake, year after year, when there
was no foundation for it. Even when a critic wanted to be particularly
friendly and complimentary to