the flashes
of humour which light up the gravity of the narrative are never out of
place nor out of tune. The cunning and resourcefulness of his boyish
heroes are the cunning and resourcefulness of America, and the sombre
Mississippi is the proper background for this national epic. The danger,
the excitement, the solemnity of the great river are vividly portrayed.
They quicken his narrative; they inspire him to eloquence. He remembers
with a simple enthusiasm the glory of the sun setting upon its broad
expanse; he remembers also that the river and its shoals are things to
fear and to fight.

Fully to realise the marvellous precision [he writes] required in laying
the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should
know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and
blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to
brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must
pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and visible wreck that would
snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and
destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steamboat and cargo
in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the
bargain.

In calm, as in flood, Mark Twain has mastered the river, and has made
it his own. Once upon a time the Mississippi called up a vision of
the great Gulf opening on the sight of La Salle, "tossing its restless
billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without
a sail, without a sign of life." Now a humbler image is evoked, and we
picture Huck Finn and Jim floating down the broad stream in the august
society of the Duke and the Dauphin.

Though Mark Twain cultivates the South-Western dialect, and does not
disdain the speech of Pike County, there is in his two romances no
suspicion of provincialism. Style and imagination give them the freedom
of the whole world. They are of universal truth and application. But
since the days of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer the conditions of American
literature have changed, and for the worse. As in England, so in
America, a wide diffusion of books, an eager and general interest in
printed matter, have had a disastrous effect. The newspapers, by giving
an improper advertisement to the makers of books, have rendered the
literary craft more difficult of pursuit. The ambition of money has
obscured the simple end of literature, and has encouraged a spirit of
pr