American writer between the close of the Civil War and the end of the century. Most of us have enough pioneer blood in our veins, or in our imaginative sympathies, to love Mark Twain nowadays. But academic people, they tell us,—and they tell us truly,—had little to do with establishing his earlier reputation. He neither flattered them nor pleased them. He pleased and flattered and liberated the emotions of that vast mass of the population which had been suppressed and inarticulate. He was the greatest booster for the average man that the country ever produced. Confident in the political and mechanical and natural superiorities conferred upon every son of these States by his mere birth under the American flag, Mark Twain laughed at the morality of France, the language of Germany, the old masters of Italy, the caste system of India, the imperialism of England, the romances of Scott, the penal laws of the sixteenth century, and at the chivalry of the court of King Arthur—he laughed at all the non-American world, from the point of view of the average American, stopping only from time to time to pat his countrymen on the back and to cry, like Jack Horner, 'What a brave boy am I!' To make a climax to the bold irreverence of this Jacksonian laughter, he laughed
