wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold. In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," "General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling