At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the race--because he had brought death into the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set free. He thought it was far harder to live than to die. In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son: “Oh! we'll all get blind drunk When Johnny comes marching home!” And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: “I was curious to know what Philip had for dinner.” Mark Twain was capable of epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said “Humour there is in almost every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies--on the deep melancholy of Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear.” The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist--or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony--from Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human tears: “_Sunt lachrymae rerum._” “Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements,” counselled Oliver Wendell Holmes. “You can't expect to do anything great with Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella.” Mark Twain has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness. The world is loth to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own. Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the almost insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a serious thinker. Says Moliere-- “_C'est une etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens._”