Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment, laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the course of the national development. But 'The Gilded Age' has long since disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works which are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much as I enjoy the satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating nor inspiring--nor national. It tends to the gratification of England and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national stamp. One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is the embodiment of an “ideal” still only too commonly cherished in America. The national type, I take it, is found in such characters as Lincoln and Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W. Eliot and Edwin A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut Yankee', jovial and whole--hearted though he be. I say this without forgetting or minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the devastating and illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a remotely past civilization. 'Joan of Arc' has no local association, being a pure work of the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit. 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a masterpiece; but its significance lies, not in the locality of its setting, but in the universality of its moral. In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit of Mark Twain. We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him a spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy. But it was the South and the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and civilization. This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always seemed to me to have been a period of--shall I say?--God-appointed preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience, and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience.