The humor that lives, however, is not drollery; it must be embodied in a humorous character like Falstaff, for instance, or Don Quixote. The most of Mark Twain's fun comes from exaggerated situations with no attempt at characterization, and therein lies his weakness as a humorist. Huckleberry Finn and Colonel Sellers come the nearest to being humorous creations, but Huckleberry Finn is but a bit of _genre_, the eternal bad boy in a Pike County costume, and Colonel Sellers is but a preliminary study toward a character, a shadowy figure that we feel constantly to be on the point of jumping into greatness without ever actually arriving. Narrowly as he may have missed the mark in these two characters, Mark Twain cannot be classed with the great humorists. V There are three Mark Twains: there is Mark Twain, the droll comedian, who wrote for the masses and made them laugh; there is Mark Twain, the indignant protester, who arose ever and anon to true eloquence in his denunciation of tyranny and pretense; and there is Mark Twain, the romancer, who in his boyhood had dreamed by the great river and who later caught the romance of a period in American life. The masterpiece of the first is _The Jumping Frog_, of the second _The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg_, and of the third _Life on the Mississippi_ and _Roughing It_. It is this third Mark Twain that still lives and that will continue to live in American literature. He saw with distinctness a unique area of American life. As the brief and picturesque era faded away he caught the sunset glory of it and embodied it in romance--the steamboat days on the river in the slavery era, the old régime in the South, the barbarism of the Plains, the great buffalo herds, the wild camps in the gold fields of Nevada and California. In half a dozen books: _Roughing It_, _Life on the Mississippi_, _The Gilded Age_ (a few chapters of it), _Tom Sawyer_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _Pudd'nhead Wilson_, he has done work that can never be done again. The world that these books depict has vanished as completely as the Bagdad of Haroun al Raschid. Not only has he told the story of this vanished world, illustrating it with descriptions and characterizations that are like Flemish portraits, but he has caught and held the spirit of it, and he has thrown over it all the nameless glow of romance. It is as golden a land that he leads us through as any we may find in Scott, and yet it was drawn from the life with painstaking care. Scott and Bulwer and Cooper angered Mark Twain. They were careless of facts, they were sentimental, they misinterpreted the spirit of the times they depicted and the men and women who lived in them, but these six books of Mark Twain may be placed among the source books of American history. Nowhere else can one catch so truly certain phases of the spirit of the mid-nineteenth century West. Over every page of them may be written those words from the preface of _The Innocents Abroad_, "I am sure I