Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even "Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr. Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder."