inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand
dollar prize--a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and
scorn!

Mark Twain was a great humorist--more genial than grim, more
good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be "frightened by the
venerableness of the institution"; and his sublimated journalism reveals
a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is
the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited
that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in
the contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible
youth. Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical
influence in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian
look out through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.

And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great
writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that
highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and
even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view,
it was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain "from
a new angle"; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of
Europe; and the author of the essay was invited "to explain Mark Twain
to the German public"! There are still many people, however, who resent