n plugs, and
found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and
rubbish of two thousand years ago!

Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a
single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive
character known as "Mark Twain." At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw
achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic
wit known as "G. B. S." To the composition of "Mark Twain" went all the
wild humour of ignorance--the boisterously comic admixture of the
sanguinary and the stoical. The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The
Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not
the sophisticated humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme.
Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the _nil admirari_
attitude of "Mark Twain" no more enlightening nor suggestive than the
stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent
naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found
instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples.
The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in
this gay fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but
half-concealed shrewdness. They laughed at this unsophisticated _naif_,
gazing in wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the
consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching
intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen
perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The note of this
early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and
his companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide
--one of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name
of Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended
ignorance, they finally asked him if the mummy was dead. When Ferguson
glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was
dumbfounded at the fury of the "doctor" for being imposed upon with vile
second-hand carcases. The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't
bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him! No wonder
that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson
laconically remarked that they were lunatics!

In speaking of contemporary society, Ibse