Eh,
Lampton? What’s that you say?
You poor misguided poet,
“When
Boston’s done and bottled up?”
Well, when it is, let’s know it.
Time
it be indeed, till old New York’s
A pretty place and clever;
Till
her pol’s have sprouted wings,
And that, Bill, is never!
July
8, ‘10
Tues,
July 12 in NYH
New-York Daily Tribune, Thursday, July 7, 1910, p. 6
From The
Mark Twain Project:
William James Lampton (1851?–1917) was the
grandson of James Lampton (1787–1865), one of Jane Clemens’s seven paternal
uncles. He was therefore Clemens’s second cousin (and a first cousin once
removed of James J. Lampton, the model for Colonel Sellers). James Lampton
became wealthy from iron ore discovered on his Kentucky land, and his business
passed to William’s father, William Henry Lampton (1813–99). In 1873 William
left Kentucky for St. Louis, where he took a position with Garrett, McDowell
and Company, Commission Merchants and Dealers in Pig Iron. In 1876 he again
wrote Clemens, proposing a visit, and was rebuffed: Clemens wrote on the
envelope of his letter, “Declined to suffer the affliction of his visit”
(Lampton to SLC, 26 June 76, CU-MARK).
In 1877 Lampton succeeded in becoming a journalist by launching the Ashland
(Kentucky) Weekly Review,with his father’s money. Around that time he may
have managed to meet Clemens and his family, as suggested by his close to an
exultant letter of 18 February 1882, on the letter-head of the Steubenville
(Ohio) Herald (CU-MARK):
The editor
of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Henry Watterson, of course recognized
the name “Lampton,” and may have known of William’s family relationship to
Clemens—and, more remotely, to himself. In later years Lampton wrote several
books, as well as humorous poems he called “yawps,” which were printed in the
New York Sunand collected in Yawps and Other Things(Philadelphia:
Henry Altemus Company, ca. 1900) (Selby,
15, 30, 112; Lampton
1990, 161–73).
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