Father desires me to write to you and thank you for your kind remembrance of him in sending him the manuscript of Mark Twain’s “Old Times on the Mississippi” He has read his articles on this subject with a keen appreciation. It vividly recalls an experience in his life about which he is never tired of talking. He has unanimously resolved that Mark is the “Prince of Wits” the “King of Jesters.” Father and Uncle William and the boys have some hearty laughs over the “cub-pilot’s” adventures all of which they appreciate and enjoy as we “land-lubbers” do not. We have not seen his fifth article yet but I suppose it will be copied into some of our papers before long.

Mark Twain’s dramatized version of his novel, “The Gilded Age,” is, on the whole, a poor affair. . . . Colonel Mulberry Sellers of Hawkeye, Missouri, is a true character-creation and a real representative and typical American. . . . The credit of conceiving Colonel Sellers fairly belongs to Mr. Clemens, but it is safe to say that the character would never have made a strong impression upon the public mind if the author had not been fortunate enough to find an illustrator of his idea in such an artist as Mr. John T. Raymond. The conception needed the individuality and concreteness of a dramatic performance to make it telling; and at the same time,—as the part is carried by the playwright to the very verge of caricature, and sometimes over the line,—it would have become a mere extravagant absurdity in the hands of an actor of ordinary insight and judgment. Mr. Raymond seems completely to have grasped the dramatist’s idea, to have enlarged and enriched that idea by his own observation of life, and then to have given expression to his perfectly rounded and consistent conception in a performance full of vitality and force, of picturesqueness and humor, and even of lively imagination. . . . The impersonation compels attention and admiration at once. (“Music and the Drama,” 2)

I went yesterday afternoon to Mark Twain’s play of Colonel Sellers, and was immensely pleased. The character is the whole piece, nearly, but it is quite enough. There was one delicious scene in court, where Sellers is witness in behalf of the young lady who has killed her bigamous husband, which was ineffable. He delivers his testimony in a stump speech, and every now and then becomes so carried away by his own eloquence that he turns round and addresses the jury. “Why, gentlemen of the Jury!” and it takes the whole force of the law to stop him. He would be a good witness for the Beecher trial. (Howells 1979 [bib01004], 95)

We leave wholly to science the estimation of Mr. King’s services to geology and geography; for our pleasure in him is chiefly, we own, a literary pleasure, and if we were to tell the whole truth, perhaps our readers would be shocked to know how much we value the extraordinary beauty and vigor of his descriptions above the facts described. We accept the information he gives with mute gratitude, but we must needs exclaim at the easy charm of his style, the readiness of his humor, the quickness of his feeling for character. His “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada” is mainly the record of his ascent of different peaks of that chain, in language so vivid that it all seems an experience of the reader’s; and interspersing these memories of Mount Tyndall and Shasta and Whitney and Yosemite and Merced are such sketches of life, Pike and Digger and Californian, as make us wish from him the fullest study of varieties of human nature which we as yet know only by glimpses. (Howells 1872, 500)