Emerson was a man who never courted or obtained popularity, who hitched his readers to a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who wrote always for minds that may have been democratic, but certainly could not have been common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an aristocrat in tastes, a democrat by sympathy and conviction, whose stories, even his bad stories, contained that essential adventure, that rapid and unexpected and successful action, which satisfies the universal craving for struggle well ended, stories so popular that his enemies were entranced by them even while they abused him. The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the greatness of Emerson is the airy strength of his ideology, his permanence in the history of American civilization is determined by the expression he gave to the moral optimism of the typical American. And if the popularity of Cooper was due to the unflagging interest of his adventure and the romance of his actors and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him more than a good story-teller and gives him great place in the social history of America is his incarnation of the ideals and the morality of a native democracy in Deerslayer, whom all Americans could understand and admire. Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Hawthorne was a moralist romancer whose austere talents forced admiration and a somewhat doubtful popularity. Twain touched the universal note of humorous exaggeration so early and so readily that his stern moral basis went unremarked. Men read him for humor as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing the ideas of each as unconsciously as the child takes medicine in a sugared glass. Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of lofty moral ideals is more evident than any appeal to the masses, yet the most careless reader feels that his warnings are for a new world that has broken with tradition and must face its problems of sin and sex in a democracy of conscience. And if Mark Twain writes obviously to amuse the democracy, yet he seldom fails to preach to them also. “Huckleberry Finn,” to the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other things an epic of the injustice, the inconsistency of sophisticated man and his social system, seen through the eyes of the new world on the Mississippi, where tradition, in the fresh, crude light, showed its seams of decay. There is a tract upon slavery in “Huckleberry Finn,” and another upon dueling, and a third on social distinctions, and a fourth upon conventionalized religion. And readers of Clemens will not forget how the bones of his acrid philosophy wore through the skin of his humor in those later books, especially in “The Mysterious Stranger,” where a hatred of social injustice and the melancholy foreboding which has always accompanied the optimism of American democracy had such full escape that the publishers were led to print it as a fairytale for children that it might be enjoyed by minds too unobservant to trouble with its warnings.