formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic
juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic
irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and
provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its
mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many
have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings
toward that classic damsel of the sixth century? At first he got along
easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort
of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to unwind one
of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could
never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of
the Mother of the German Language!

Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries,
savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous
contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire,
as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types
thirteen centuries apart. Not even heaven was safe from the
comprehensive survey of his satire; and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven' is a remarkable document,--a forthright lay sermon,--the
conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as
heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly
significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a
deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence.

Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later
development of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain
has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and
only secondarily a wit. But the passion for brief and pungent