Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his make and manner.  I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground.  His style was what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before.  I have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to.  That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after.  If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him.  Then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what he had been talking about.  He observed this manner in the construction of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his compilations.—­[Nowhere is this characteristic better found than in Twain’s ‘Autobiography,’ it was not a “style” it was unselfconscious thought D.W.]—­I helped him with a Library of Humor, which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition, with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart, and “chucked” the pieces in wherever the fancy, for them took him at the moment.  He was right:  we were not making a text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it; and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me.  On minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite phrases or pet words.  He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology.  If a word served his turn better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.

V.

At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals.  When Clemens began to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show him a reason for.  He never made the least of that trouble which so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors.  If you wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a word or a sentence or