the Saturday Morning Club, using for his text
examples of slipshod English which Breen had noted.

Clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography,
diaries, letters, and such intimate human history. Greville's 'Journal
of the Reigns of George IV. and William IV.' he had read much and
annotated freely. Greville, while he admired Byron's talents, abhorred
the poet's personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious
person and a debauchee. He adds:

Then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is
himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does
not belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the
time conscious they are not in reality.

Clemens wrote on the margin:

But, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human
race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own
heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel
as Byron did, and for the same reason. Do you admire the race (&
consequently yourself)?

A little further along--where Greville laments that Byron can take no
profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully,
Clemens commented:

If Byron--if any man--draws 50 characters, they are all himself--50
shades, 50 moods, of his own character. And when the man draws them
well why do they stir my admiration? Because they are me--I
recognize myself.

A volume of Plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and
the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Two Years Before the Mast
he loved, and never tired of. The more recent Memoirs of Andrew D. White
and Moncure D. Conway both, I remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the
Letters of Lowell. A volume of the Letters of Madame de Sevigne had some
annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or
for that matter to Sevigne herself, whom he once designates as
a "nauseating" person, many of whose letters had been uselessly
translated, as well as poorly arranged for reading. But he would read
any volume of letters or personal memoirs; none were too poor that had
the throb of life in them, however slight.

Of such sort were the books that Mark Twain had loved best, and such
were a few of his words concerning them. Some of them belong to his
earlier reading, and among these is Darwin's 'Descent of Man', a book
whose influence was always present, though I