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.