Enclosure with 12 January 1869 to Mary Mason Fairbanks • El Paso, Ill.
(Lansing State Republican, 31 Dec 68, MTDP 00323)

The Lecture of Mark Twain.

Last Wednesday evening Mead’s Hall was well filled to hear Mark Twain discourse on the American Vandal abroad. He is a young man, little over thirty years of age, and looks as though he had never been a drawing room pet, but had been used to the rough and tumble, the ups and downs of life. His wit was eminently dry, and the force of his manner, which is natural, and not affected, made it still more striking. He talked easily, walking up and down the stage at a pace that slowly marked the time of his words. His delightful description of Venice by moonlight, the Sphinx, the Acropolis at Athens, were as fine specimens of word painting as can be drawn by any other lecturer. Each of these telling passages would be followed by some humorous comment that would convulse the house with laughter. The lecture was intended to amuse, as well as to instruct, and the object was fully attained. A lecturer tells his own jokes best, and we will not repeat them. Those who heard appreciated the fun, and those who failed to hear, had no business to be somewhere else. The Vandal, who yet disgraces the national name in the classic cities of the old world, was drawn to the life.

The real name of Mark Twain is S. L. Clemens, and he was for several years city editor of a paper in Virginia City, Nevada, and first attracted the attention of the reading public by contributions to California papers. He is a special correspondent of the New York Tribune, and every thing he writes adds to his reputation as an American humorist. His manner is judged by many to be affected on the stage, which is untrue, his manner being the same in personal conversation, and an infirmity which, as he says, was honestly inherited.

As a humorous lecturer we have no hesitation in giving Mark Twain a decided preference over the renowned and lamented Artemus Ward. If Nasby, by the will of Lowell, becomes his successor as a humorist, we think Twain is destined to more than make good the place formerly filled by Ward.4 He is sure to provoke the hearty laugh that shakes the cobwebs from the brain and the hypochondria from the ribs. And as laughter is no sin, if it takes the proper time to come in, we hope Twain will make his calling and election sure, and continue to amuse as well as instruct the grave, austere, American nation.

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4 Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) died of tuberculosis in Southhampton, England, on 6 March 1867 (L2, 9 n. 2). The vernacular political and social satire of Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby (David Ross Locke), in his lectures and his widely reprinted Toledo Blade letters, made him seem a logical successor to James Russell Lowell, whose Biglow Papers, dialect verse in a similar vein, appeared serially before being collected in 1848 and 1867. Lowell, at this time Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, was devoting himself to literary criticism.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Lansing (Mich.) State Republican, 31 Dec 68, 3; from microfilm edition at the Michigan State Library, Lansing (Mi).

Previous publication: L3, 455–456; none known other than the copy-text.

Provenance:Neither of the enclosures survives with the letter.