The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony of Swift, the _gros sel_ of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain. They recognized in him not only “the most successful and original wag of his day,” but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman “the honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called American literature.” We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad', published in The Athenaeum in 1880: “Mark Twain is American pure and simple. To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the Fourth of July.” Mark Twain was admired because he was “a literary artist of exceptional skill”; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that “he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade himself.” Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the “first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the hearing of the mass of English people”; during the period of 'Tom Sawyer', “the completest boy in fiction,” the immortal 'Huckleberry Finn', “the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled piece of literature in the language,” and 'Life on the Mississippi', vastly appreciated in England as in Germany for its _cultur-historisch_ value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted honour of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their hearts with fervour and abandon--during this long period of almost four decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him, may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon race. “The vast majority of readers here regard him,” said Mr. Sydney Brooks in 1907, “to a degree in which they regard no other living writer, as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour.” To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial bond, that _entente cordiale_ of blood and heart, which he did so much to strengthen and secure. “A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something more than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great citizen. It is a compliment to the American people, and one that will come home to them with peculiar gratification. . . . The feeling for Mark Twain among his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir Walter eighty odd years ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles Dickens. There is admiration in it, gratitude, pride, and, above all, an immense and intimate tenderness of affection. To writers alone it is given to win a sentiment of this quality--to writers and occasionally, by the oddness of the human mind, to generals. Perhaps one would best take the measure of the American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it as a compound of what Dickens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of what Lord Roberts enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the intensity of all transatlantic emotions. The 'popularity' of statesmen, even of such a statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection. It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and abroad; but also because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other men, the incarnation of the American spirit.”