wn life. Jamestown,
Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,
uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life
and live again in the pages of his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main
correct but "stretched a little" here and there; Tom Sawyer, the
"magerful" hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from
his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle
heart--these and many another were drawn from the very life. In writing
of his time _a propos_ of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the
truth about humanity in general and for any time.

In the main--though there are noteworthy exceptions--Mark Twain's works
originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is a master
humorist--which is only another way of saying that he is a master
psychologist with the added gift of humour--because he looked upon
himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of universally
human characteristics. _Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi alienum est_
--this might well have served for his motto. It was his conviction that
the American possessed no unique and peculiar human characteristics
differentiating him from the rest of the world. In the same way, he
regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race.
Like Omar he might have said "I myself am Heaven and Hell"----for within
himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every
feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is
capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study
of the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination--for
he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was
by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself
the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing
works of such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at
bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more
universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation
of the human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.

It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of
America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual
life of Europe derives