Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually praising their "unrestrained frankness." And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that are current in every New York publishing house?