Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/407

 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

If Samuel Clemens missed a fortune, he inherited good blood. On both sides his family had been settled in the South since early colonial times. His father, John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, was a descendant of Gregory Clemens, who became one of the judges that condemned Charles I. to death, was excepted from the amnesty after the Restoration in consequence, and lost his head. A cousin of John M. Clemens, Jeremiah Clemens, represented Ala bama in the United States Senate from 1849 to 1853.

Through his mother, Jane Lampton (Lambton), the boy was descended from the Lambtons of Dur ham, whose modern English representatives still possess the lands held by their ancestors of the same name since the twelfth century. Some of her fore bears on the maternal side, the Montgomerys, went with Daniel Boone to Kentucky, and were in the thick of the romantic and tragic events that accom panied the settlement of the Dark and Bloody Ground,&quot; and she herself was born there twenty- nine years after the first log cabin was built within the limits of the present commonwealth. She was one of the earliest, prettiest, and brightest of the many belles that have given Kentucky such an en viable reputation as a nursery of fair women, and her vivacity and wit left no doubt in the minds of her friends concerning the source of her son s genius.

John Marshall Clemens, who had been trained for the bar in Virginia, served for some years as a mag istrate at Hannibal, holding for a time the position of county judge. With his death, in March, 1847, Mark Twain s formal education came to an end, and

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