You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else . . . .  You have pervaded your century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and it is astonishing how you keep spreading . . . .  You are my “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” more than any other writer.

Clemens, who was reading Howells’s serial, “Their Silver-Wedding journey,” then running in Harper’s Magazine, responded: 

You are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate & delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way.  I don’t know how you can—­but I suspect.  I suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke—­a poor joke—­the poorest that was ever contrived.  Since I wrote my Bible—­[The “Gospel,” What is Man?]—­(last year), which Mrs. Clemens loathes & shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before, & so I have lost my pride in him & can’t write gaily nor praisefully about him any more . . . .

Next morning.  I have been reading the morning paper.  I do it every morning—­well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization & cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race.  I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

He was not greatly changed.  Perhaps he had fewer illusions and less iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to Howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before.  There is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to Mrs. Clemens’s violence.

I mustn’t stop to play now or I shall never get those helfiard letters answered. (That is not my spelling.  It is Mrs. Clemens’s, I have told her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never remembers.)

All through this Vienna period (as during several years before and after) Henry Rogers was in full charge of Mark Twain’s American affairs.  Clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large, that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings.  The complications growing out of the type machine and Webster failures were endless.—­["I hope to goodness I sha’n’t get you into any more jobs such as the type-setter and Webster business and the Bliss-Harper campaigns have been.  Oh, they were sickeners.” (Clemens to Rogers, November 15, 1898.)]—­The disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for a literary agent.  The consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and financial schemes must have required not only thought, but time.  Yet Mr. Rogers comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt, perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention.  Clemens once wrote him: