Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off, and another
duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough through
it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and the
lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off! It
was over. I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback. I had
been sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes. It seemed ten
minutes at the outside. If you have ever tried to address a public
meeting, you will know what this means. It means that Mark Twain is a
consummate public speaker. If ever he chose to say anything, he would
say it marvellously well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour,
he surpasses our most accomplished parliamentary speakers."

The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony
of Swift, the _gros sel_ of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was
ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain.
They recognized in him not only "the most successful and original wag of
his day," but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman "the
honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called
American literature." We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad',
published in The Athenaeum in 1880: "Mark Twain is American pure and
simple. To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the
groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to
write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his
intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the
Fourth of July." Mark Twain was admired because he was "a literary
artist of exceptional skill"; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that
"he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it
dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the
anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic
narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade
himself." Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the
"first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the
hearing of the mass of English people"; during the period of 'Tom
Sawyer', "the completest boy in fiction," the immortal 'Huckleberry
Finn', "the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled
piece of literature in the language," and 'Life on the Mississippi',
vastly appreciated in England as in Germany f