It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and even flattered it. If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.