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Who really said it

I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It

Not Mark Twain — Judge Hoar, in 1884 Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar 1816–1895 · American judge and U.S. Attorney General
Disputed Free to reuse

The joke is a New England lawyer’s, and it is fifty years older than the Twain version. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to February 1884 and the funeral of the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, whom Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar disliked: asked whether he would attend, Hoar said “No … but I approve it!” We read an 1887 printing of the quip ourselves, in a public-domain collection at page 581. Mark Twain does not appear in the story until 1938, and the “nice letter” — the detail that makes the modern version land — arrives with him.

Last verified 18 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It” Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, February 1884; printed in Samuel Arthur Bent, Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men, 6th ed. (Boston: Ticknor, 1887), p. 581. Not Mark Twain, who is first linked to it in 1938. Traced by Quotle.info · Verbatim: “No, I am not invited, but I approve of it nevertheless.”

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In context

Evoking the world of Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar — American judge · U.S. Attorney General. Theme: "I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source, read in full view

Earliest documented
29 February 1884 · Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, “Approving of the Funeral”, p. 2, crediting the Boston Post
Quoted here from
Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men
That book
Samuel Arthur Bent · sixth edition · Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887 · p. 581
The funeral
Wendell Phillips, who died in Boston on 2 February 1884
Verdict
Disputed — not Twain; a Judge Hoar quip of 1884

Judge Hoar, being asked if he should attend Mr. Wendell Phillips’s funeral, replied, “No, I am not invited, but I approve of it nevertheless.” Samuel Arthur Bent, Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men, 6th ed., 1887, p. 581

We read this directly in the Internet Archive’s full-view scan of the 1887 sixth edition ↗, at page 581. It sits inside Bent’s explanatory note to a remark of Carlyle’s about Hoar — so it is the editor’s report of the quip, not a saying of Carlyle’s. One warning about the scan: its OCR renders the opening “No” as “Xo”. The word is No.

Public-domain book, full view
Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men (Ticknor, 1887) at the Internet Archive — the quip is at p. 581
Quote Investigator: I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ gives the earliest citation as a report of 29 February 1884 in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, “Approving of the Funeral”, page 2, column 5, crediting the Boston Post: asked whether he was going to Wendell Phillips’s funeral, Hoar replied “No … but I approve it!”
  • We confirmed an independent early printing ourselves rather than taking it on trust. Samuel Arthur Bent’s Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men, sixth edition, Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887, carries the quip at page 581 of the Internet Archive’s full-view scan ↗, credited to Hoar and tied to Phillips’s funeral.
  • The attribution held for decades. QI ↗ cites the New York Times of 5 February 1895, “Anecdotes of the Late Judge Hoar”, page 4, which calls it “perhaps, Judge Hoar’s best-known remark, and the one that has oftenest been seen in print”, and gives it as “No, I don’t; but I approve of it.”
  • Twain arrives late and second-hand. QI’s earliest Twain instance ↗ is a reader’s letter in The Judge magazine in January 1938, which describes Twain’s supposed actions rather than quoting him; the first version QI finds in quotation marks is Walter Winchell’s column of 18 July 1946. QI also reports that the saying is not in Twain’s writings and quotes TwainQuotes editor Barbara Schmidt: “there is no evidence that links Mark Twain to the funeral quote”.
Public domain

The wording quoted here is from the sixth edition of Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men by Samuel Arthur Bent, Boston: Ticknor and Company, with copyright notices of 1882 and 1887 printed in the volume — comfortably before the 1931 cutoff for the United States public domain, and the Internet Archive serves it in full view. The 1884 newspaper report behind it is older still.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often credited to Mark Twain

A joke with a documented author and a documented date spent the twentieth century being handed to a funnier name.

Mark Twain No evidence

The saying is not in Twain’s writings and is not in the TwainQuotes repository; Quote Investigator ↗ quotes its editor, Barbara Schmidt: “there is no evidence that links Mark Twain to the funeral quote”. QI’s earliest Twain instance is a reader’s letter to The Judge in January 1938 — fifty-four years after Hoar, and twenty-eight after Twain’s own death in 1910 ↗.

William M. Evarts A later claimant

By 1889 the joke was already drifting to another eminent lawyer. QI ↗ cites Mountstuart E. Grant-Duff’s published diary, in an entry dated 12 March 1889, giving it as Evarts’s: “No, I shall not attend; but I quite approve of it.”

“I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it” Later embellishment

Hoar’s versions are terse — “No, but I approve it”; “No, I am not invited, but I approve of it nevertheless.” There is no letter in any of them. The letter enters with the Twain retelling in 1938, where QI ↗ quotes it as “he wrote them a very nice letter explaining that he approved of it”.

Best evidence: Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar on the funeral of Wendell Phillips, reported 29 February 1884 in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette from the Boston Post, per Quote Investigator ↗ — and printed in 1887 in Bent’s Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men, p. 581 ↗, which we read.

Context

Why it mattered

The joke needs its enmity to work. Wendell Phillips ↗ (1811–1884) was an abolitionist, orator and labour reformer; Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar ↗ (1816–1895) was a Massachusetts judge, U.S. Attorney General and the first head of the Department of Justice. Bent’s 1887 note explains the grudge: Hoar objected to Phillips’s attacks on public men, including his calling Lincoln “the slave-hound of Illinois”.

Strip that out and you have a generic one-liner, which is exactly what happened to it. By 1893 a New Zealand paper was running it with “a certain Judge and a certain politician”, and by 1904 the target had been swapped to Benjamin Butler.

No, I am not invited, but I approve of it nevertheless.

Read the full story

The chronology QI assembles ↗ is a textbook of quote drift: the wording shifts in 1885 to “I don’t object, I am sure”; the names fall away in 1893; the speaker becomes Evarts in 1889 and the target becomes Butler in 1904; Twain appears in 1938 as a story, in 1946 as a quotation, and in 1948 inside a Twain collection annotated “from an unidentified newspaper clipping”.

The 1887 printing is also a small lesson in reading sources. The quip appears there inside an editor’s parenthetical note attached to a line of Carlyle’s about Hoar — the sort of nesting that makes it easy, a century later, to credit the wrong man on the page.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Mortality Character Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: I Did Not Attend the Funeral …quoteinvestigator.com

The full chronology from the 1884 Boston Post report to the Twain attributions of 1938 and 1946.
Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men (1887)archive.org

Public-domain full-view scan; the Hoar quip is at page 581.
Wikipedia: Ebenezer Rockwood Hoaren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the judge the quip belongs to.
Wikipedia: Wendell Phillipsen.wikipedia.org

The abolitionist orator whose funeral the joke is about.
Wikiquote: Mark Twainen.wikiquote.org

Twain’s quotation page — where this saying does not appear in the sourced material.
Wikipedia: Mark Twainen.wikipedia.org

The man the joke was handed to — and his dates, which place the 1938 attribution 28 years after his death.

The author

About Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar

Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar

1816–1895 · American judge · U.S. Attorney General

Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (1816–1895) was an American politician, lawyer and jurist from Massachusetts. He sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, served as U.S. Attorney General from 1869 to 1870 and was the first head of the newly created Department of Justice; Grant nominated him to the Supreme Court, where the Senate rejected him, and later appointed him to the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Washington. He had a reputation for sharp remarks delivered at exactly the right moment — this was the most famous of them, and the New York Times said so in his obituary year.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The source we read (Chicago)

Bent, Samuel Arthur. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men, with Historical and Explanatory Notes. 6th ed. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887, p. 581. Earliest documented instance: “Approving of the Funeral”, Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, 29 February 1884, p. 2, col. 5 (crediting the Boston Post), as located by Quote Investigator.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It’?” Last verified 18 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-did-not-attend-the-funeral-but-i-sent-a-nice-letter/

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