It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that humour may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product. Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a “sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one.” There is always a breadth of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very greatest humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time with ridiculous likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the strong but pungent flavour of the soil. Though expressing distaste for Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock common sense. Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning of his career to the very end. Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing interest as human nature. Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives in which the prime concern is not the “story,” but the almost scientific revelation of the natural history of the characters. The corrosive and mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift. That “disposition for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it,” which George Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British humour, is Mark Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is, perhaps, because he relates us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark Twain is the foremost of American humorists.