Hartford, 1876.  Use with care, for it is a scarce book.  England
    had to be ransacked in order to get it—­or the bookseller speaketh
    falsely.

He once wrote a paper for 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 believe he did not read it any more in later years.  In the days I knew him he read steadily not much besides Suetonius and Pepys and Carlyle.  These and his simple astronomies and geologies and the Morte Arthure and the poems of Kipling were seldom far from his hand.