difficult to understand, the vengeance of Ivan the Terrible, who ordered the massacre of 90,000 inhabitants of the principality. In 1609-1612 the city was plundered both by the followers of the second false Demetrius and by the Poles.
TWAIN, MARK, the nom de plume of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), American author, who was born on the 30th of November 1835, at Florida, Missouri.
His father was a country merchant from Tennessee, who moved
soon after his son's birth to Hannibal, Missouri, a little town
on the Mississippi. When the boy was only twelve his father
died, and thereafter he had to get his education as best he
could. Of actual schooling he had little. He learned how to
set type, and as a journeyman printer he wandered widely,
going even as far east as New York. At seventeen he went
back to the Mississippi, determined to become a pilot on a
river-steamboat. In his Life on the Mississippi he has recorded
graphically his experiences while “learning the river.” But
in 1861 the war broke out, and the pilot's occupation was gone.
After a brief period of uncertainty the young man started
West with his brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor
of Nevada. He went to the mines for a season,
and there he began to write in the local newspapers, adopting
the pen name of “Mark Twain,” from a call used in taking
soundings on the Mississippi steamboats. He drifted in time
to San Francisco, and it was a newspaper of that city which in
1867 supplied the money for him to join a party going on a
chartered steamboat to the Mediterranean ports. The letters
which he wrote during this voyage were gathered in 1869 into
a volume, The Innocents Abroad, and the book immediately
won a wide and enduring popularity. This popularity was of
service to him when he appeared on the platform with a lecture
or rather with an apparently informal talk, rich in admirably
delivered anecdote. He edited a daily newspaper in Buffalo
for a few months, and in 1870 he married Miss Olivia L.
Langdon (d. 1904), removing a year later to Hartford, where he
established his home. Roughing It was published in 1872,
and in 1874 he collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner
in The Gilded Age, from which he made a play, acted many
hundred times with John T. Raymond as “Colonel Sellers.” In
1875 he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the sequel
to which, Huckleberry Finn, did not appear until 1884. The
result of a second visit to Europe was humorously recorded in
A Tramp Abroad (1880), followed in 1882 by a more or less
historical romance, The Prince and the Pauper; and a year
later came Life on the Mississippi. The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, the next of his books, was published (in 1884)
by a New York firm in which the author was chief partner.
This firm prospered for a while, and issued in 1889 Mark Twain's
own comic romance, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's
Court, and in 1892 a less successful novel, The American Claimant.
But after a severe struggle the publishing house failed,
leaving the author charged with its very heavy debts. After this
disaster he issued a third Mississippi Valley novel, The Tragedy of
Pudd'nhead Wilson, in 1894, and in 1896 another historical
romance, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, wherein the
maid is treated with the utmost sympathy and reverence.
He went on a tour round the world, partly to make money
by lecturing and partly to get material for another book of
travels, published in 1897, and called in America Following
the Equator, and in England More Tramps Abroad. From
time to time he had collected into volumes his scattered sketches;
of these the first, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, appeared in 1867, and the latest, The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg, in 1900. To be recorded also is a volume
of essays and literary criticisms, How to Tell a Story (1897).
A complete edition of his works was published in twenty-two
volumes in 1890-1900 by the American Publishing Company of
Hartford. And in this last year, having paid off all the debts
of his old firm, he returned to America. By the time he died
his books had brought him a considerable fortune. In later
years he published a few minor volumes of fiction, and a series
of severe and also amusing criticisms of Christian Science
(published
as a book in 1907), and in 1906 he began an autobiography
in the North American Review. He had a great reception
in England in 1907, when he went over to receive from Oxford
the degree of Doctor of Literature. He died at Redding,
Connecticut, on the 21st of April 1910. Of his four daughters
only one, who married the Russian pianist Gabrilowitch,
survived him. Mark Twain was an outstanding figure for many
years as a popular American personality in the world of letters.
He is commonly considered as a humorist, and no doubt he is a
humorist of a remarkable comic force and of a refreshing fertility.
But the books in which his humour is broadly displayed, the
travels and the sketches, are not really so significant of his
power as the three novels of the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer,
Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, wherein we have
preserved a vanished civilization, peopled with typical figures,
and presented with inexorable veracity. There is no lack
of humour in them, and there is never a hint of affectation
in the writing; indeed, the author, doing spontaneously
the work nearest to his hand, was very likely unconscious
that he was making a contribution to history. But such
Huckleberry Finn is, beyond all question; it is a story of very
varied interest, now comic, now almost tragic, frequently
poetic, unfailingly truthful, although not always sustained
at its highest level. And in these three works of fiction there
are not only humour and pathos, character and truth, there
is also the largeness of outlook on life such as we find only
in the works of the masters. Beneath his fun-making we can
discern a man who is fundamentally serious, and whose ethical
standards are ever lofty. Like Cervantes at times, Mark
Twain reveals a depth of melancholy beneath his playful
humour, and like Molière always, he has a deep scorn and a
burning detestation of all sorts of sham and pretence, a scorching
hatred of humbug and hypocrisy. Like Cervantes and like
Molière, he is always sincere and direct.
After Mark Twain's death, his intimate friend, W. D. Howells, published in 1910 a series of personal recollections in Harper's Magazine.
(B. M.)
TWEED, a river in the south of Scotland. It rises in the south-west corner of Peeblesshire, not far from the Devil's Beef Tub (in Dumfriesshire) in the hill country in which the Clyde and Annan also rise. The stream flowing from Tweed's Wall, about 1500 ft. above the sea, is generally regarded as its source, though its origin has been traced to other streams at a still higher elevation. For the first 36 m. of its course the stream intersects the shire of Peebles in a north-easterly direction, and, shortly before the county town is reached, receives Lyne Water on the left and Manor Water on the right. The valley now widens, and the river, bending towards the south-east, passes Innerleithen, where it receives the Leithen (left) and the Quair (right). It then crosses Selkirkshire and, having received the Ettrick (reinforced by the Yarrow) on the right, flows northward past Abbotsford, forming for about 2 m. the boundary between the counties of Selkirk and Roxburgh. After receiving the Gala on the left, the Tweed crosses the north-western corner of Roxburghshire past Melrose and, after being joined by the Leader on the left, winds past Dryburgh Abbey round the south-western corner of Berwickshire. The remainder of its course is in a north-easterly direction through Roxburghshire past Kelso, where it receives the Teviot on the right, and then between the counties of Berwick and Northumberland, past Coldstream, to the town of Berwick, where it enters the North Sea. On the left it receives Eden Water at Edenmouth and Leet Water at Coldstream, and the Till from Northumberland between Coldstream and Norham Castle. The last 2 m. of its course before reaching Berwick are in England. The Tweed is 97 m.
long and drains an area of 1870 sq. m. Its bed is pebbly and sandy, and notwithstanding discolorations from manufactures, the stream, owing to its clear and sparkling appearance, still merits the epithet of the "silver Tweed." The river, however, has no estuary, and traffic is chiefly confined to Berwick, though for a short distance above the town some
