No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predecessors.  No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and may even be called forced, not to say violent.  No doubt, also, they did not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must underlie the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Moliere, in Swift and in Lowell.  But even a careless reader, skipping thru the book in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in the ’Innocents Abroad,’ that the writer of this liveliest of books of travel was no mere merry-andrew, grinning thru a horse-collar to make sport for the groundlings; but a sincere observer of life, seeing thru his own eyes and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also with profound respect for the eternal verities.

George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes “debasers of the moral currency.”  Mark Twain is always an advocate of the sterling ethical standard.  He is ready to overwhelm an affectation with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things that really deserve reverence.  It is not at the Old Masters that he scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip-service to things which they neither enjoy nor understand.  For a ruin or a painting or a legend that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help being honest—­he was born so.  For meanness of all kinds he has a burning contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath.  He has a quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx.  He is not taken in by the glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet; but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a hint of irreverence in his attitude.

‘A Tramp Abroad’ is a better book than the ‘Innocents Abroad’; it is quite as laughter-provoking, and its manner is far more restrained.  Mark Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain that it was his best.  Perhaps there is a slight falling off in ‘Following the Equator’; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of disenchantment.  But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author’s possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor.  The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him; the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is not all laughter, but whose eye is as clear as ever and whose tongue is as plain-spoken.