It’s a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath.  It
    seems that God didn’t forget to put a soul in you.  He shuts most
    literary men off with a brain, merely.

A few days later he wrote again: 

    The book is glorious-simply noble.  What masses of virgin truth
    never touched in print before!

And when he had finished it: 

    Last night I read your last chapter.  As Stedman says of the whole
    book, it’s titanic.

Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells: 

I’m not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics, and I don’t care to have them paw the book at all.  It’s my swan song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded . . . .  Well, my book is written—­let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out.  They burn in me; they keep multiplying and multiplying, but now they can’t ever be said; and besides they would require a library—­and a pen warmed up in hell.

In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote: 

When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing link:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident—­that all monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up—­the numerical mass of the nation.”

He was full of it, as he had been all along, and ’A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ is nothing less than a brief for human rights and human privileges.  That is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be more than that.  It is a pity that he should have been beset by his old demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the strength to bring it under control.

There is nothing more charming in any of Mark Twain’s work than his introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande.  There is nothing more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture—­of the King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny’s worth, that her baby might have bread.  Such things as these must save the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill