of the fixed stars had fallen in space. This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a "divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had never found itself? It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways. There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the delight he had in that doctor's gown--"I would dress that way all the time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine--which became for him a permanent robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as