In the 1601 Mark Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field.  It was written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who had no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs.  Before it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a Sunday at Elmira.  Gray said: 

“Print it and put your name to it, Mark.  You have never done a greater piece of work than that.”

John Hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic—­a “most exquisite bit of old English morality.”  Hay surreptitiously permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated privately, though sparingly, ever since.  At one time a special font of antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on hand-made paper.  They would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day.

1601 is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go.  It is better than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of Mark Twain.  Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.—­[In a note-book of a later period Clemens himself wrote:  “It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not.  I once wrote a conversation between Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir W. Raleigh, Lord Bacon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman—­this latter being cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk.

“There were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years younger than the boy Beaumont.  I built a conversation which could have happened—­I used words such as were used at that time—­1601.  I sent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender!  But that man was a praiser of Rabelais, and had been saying, ’O that we had a Rabelais!’ I judged that I could furnish him one.”]

Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year—­the year of the Hayes-Tilden campaign.  Clemens and Howells were both warm Republicans and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he confessed, for the first time in his life.  Before his return to Hartford he announced himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor Hayes’s letter of acceptance, which, he said, “expresses my own political convictions.”  His politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a Tilden and Hendricks club in Jersey City had invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a flag-raising.  He wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added: 

“You have asked me for some political counsel or advice:  In view of Mr. Tilden’s Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag.”

He wrote Howells:  “If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will go pretty straight to—­Mrs. Howells’s bad place.”