The part which the South played in the formation of the character and genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore. It was in the South and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics first appeared in full flower; and “Ned Brace,” “Major Jones,” and “Sut Lovengood” have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was to come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The stage coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant stories, the oddities of speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from the clash of diverse and oddly-assorted types. The jarring contrasts, the incongruities and surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river life unquestionably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour in the young cub-pilot, Sam Clemens. Through Mark Twain's greatest works flows the stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some indefinable share of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the greatest natural influence which his works betray. Reared in a slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry--young Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier. Not even his most enthusiastic biographers have attempted to palliate, save with half-hearted facetiousness, his inglorious desertion of the cause which he had espoused. Mark Twain is the most speedily “reconstructed rebel” on record. Is it broad-minded--or even accurate!--for Mr. Howells to say of Mark Twain: “No one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?” Mark Twain never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern “ideal.” But in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the “wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter Scott,” of the Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the “Southern ideal” of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that “moral elegance” which Mr. Owen Wister has pronounced to be one of the defining characteristics of the Southern American. “No American of Northern birth or breeding,” Mr. Howells pertinently observes, “could have imagined the spiritual struggle