made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most. It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted. Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply countersigning the verdict of America.