It is true that the dangers of American humor are no less in evidence there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity. There is the old danger of the professional humorist of fearing to fail to score his point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain is frequently grotesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his earlier books particularly there is revealed that lack of discipline which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a native of Hannibal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a country printing-office and in mining-camps, can scarcely be expected to exhibit the finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold. Mark Twain was often accused in the first years of his international reputation of a characteristically American lack of reverence. He is often irreverent. But here again the boundaries of his irreverence are precisely those which the national instinct itself has drawn. The joke stops short of certain topics which the American mind holds sacred. We all have our favorite pages in the writings of this versatile and richly endowed humorist, but I think no one can read his description of the coyote in _Roughing It_, and Huckleberry Finn's account of his first visit to the circus, without realizing that in this fresh revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of incongruity and surprise, this series of lightning-like flashes from one pole of experience to the other, we have not only masterpieces of world humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American reaction to the facts presented by universal experience. The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily successful career of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life, in the focus of public attention. But no one can read the pages of the older American humorists,--or try to recall to mind the names of paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that newspaper,--without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they caused a smile for the moment. Even those humorists who mark epochs in the history of American provincial and political satire, like Seba Smith with his _Major Jack Downing_, Newell with his _Papers of Orpheus C. Kerr_, "Petroleum V. Nasby's" _Letters from the Confedrit X Roads_, Shillaber's _Mrs. Partington_--all these have disappeared round the turn of the long road. "Hans Breitman gife a barty-- Vhere ish dot barty now?"