The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford