Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative national author which is without a parallel in the history of American literature. This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the great mass of the people, despite the _dicta_ of the _literati_. At a time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain, the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found little in him to admire or approve. There were notable exceptions, as Mr. Howells has recently pointed out--Charles Eliot Norton, Professor Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in general it is true that “in proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.” The professors of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose works were essentially ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture against the barbaric invasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's American Literature (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the position of literary culture in regard to Mark Twain. “But there is a class of writers,” we read in that work, “authors ranking below Irving or Lowell, and lacking the higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater humorists, who amuse a generation and then pass from sight. Every period demands a new manner of jest, after the current fashion . . . . The reigning favourites of the day are Frank R. Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers, and 'Mark Twain.' [Note the damning position!] But the creators of `Pomona' and 'Rudder Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,' and `Innocents Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun shines. Twenty years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged comedians of the republic. Humour alone never gives its masters a place in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must usually be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or Holmes.” This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though 'Tom Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882, 'Life on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889. Opinions analogous to those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent expression among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only yesterday 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously put forward, by a clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's