his prestige on the Pacific coast.  They were convincing, informing; tersely—­even eloquently—­descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience.  Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set, is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity.  They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day.  Their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated.  Here and there are attempts at verse.  He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect.  Examples of these dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present the general idea: 

    The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

    The turf with their bayonets turning,
    And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold,
    And our lanterns dimly burning.

Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich Island chapters of ‘Roughing It’, five years later.  They do, however, reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the Comstock and the mellowness of his later style.  He was learning to see things with better eyes, from a better point of view.  It is not difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame.