e sixth century? At first he got along
easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort
of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to unwind one
of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could
never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of
the Mother of the German Language!

Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries,
savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous
contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire,
as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types
thirteen centuries apart. Not even heaven was safe from the
comprehensive survey of his satire; and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven' is a remarkable document,--a forthright lay sermon,--the
conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as
heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly
significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a
deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence.

Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later
development of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain
has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and
only secondarily a wit. But the passion for brief and pungent
formulation of an idea grew upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
is a mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.

According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English,
the witty story French, the humorous story American. While the other
two depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon
the manner of telling. The witty story and the comic story must be
concise and end with a "point"; but the humorous story may be as
leisurely as you please and have no particular destination. Mark Twain
always maintained that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a
witty story, it required a person skilled in an art of a rare and
distinctive character to tell a humorous story successfully. Mark Twain
was himself the supreme exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story.
Take this little passage, for example, which convulsed one of his London
audiences. He was speaking of a high mountain that he had come across
in his travels. "It is so cold that people who have bee