longer time here than in England polite learning
hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in
him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were
his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius
captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
But in his own country it was different. In proportion as people thought
themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in
him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted
multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less. He stopped as if with
the long Semitic curve of Clemens's nose, which in the indulgence of his
passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced
unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends
who accepted him with the English, the European entirety--namely, Charles
Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back
from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He met
Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold
freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of
his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way
as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand,
he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall
have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens
seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as
Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them
before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with
impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.

I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was
so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked
me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an
impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens's instance in his own
uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a
satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband's true and cordial
adviser, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though
in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through
my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this
never cease