Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model. We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely "spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: "Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for