e Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that he was known to
fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'" and that as such he would be likely
to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,
as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume
aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from
the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]

Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed
since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as
much a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. But
it was a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. Every
one who ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same
discovery. Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself
with his work made it. Those who did not make it have known his work
only by hearsay and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or
have been very dull. It would be much more of a discovery to find a book
in which he has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a
poet. Even in the Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their
inconsequence, the under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking.
The answer to Moral Statistician--[In "Answers to Correspondents,"
included now in Sketches New and Old. An extract from it, and from "A
Strange Dream," will be found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with
human wisdom and righteous wrath. The "Strange Dream," though ending
in a joke, is aglow with poetry. Webb's "advertisement" was playfully
written, but it was earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a
moralist--not as a discovery, but as a matter of course. The discoveries
came along later, when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the
nations.

It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. His physiognomy,
his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward
events--all these were distinctly diverting. When we add to this that
his medium of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing
and those surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is
not so astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should
be overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose,
if o