was in his blood and brain.

"Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him.
Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,
picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation. Such language is
forcible as all primitive words are. Refinement seems to make for
weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic
words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that. Then
I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
puritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more
obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Every
word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but
only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene in
itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what
Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"

Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also a
semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
sense of character. It was made especially effective by the artistic
arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of a
phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in the
spacious times of great Elizabeth."