While we thus briefly indicate the matter of Mr. Mark Twain’s discourse, we give no notion of the exquisite humour of his manner, or of the quiet irony with which he makes a narrative that might be exceedingly dismal a cause of perpetual mirth. A smile never appears on his lips and he makes the most startling remarks as if he were uttering the merest common-place. At times, indeed, he rises into serious eloquence, as when, for instance, he describes in glowing terms the beauties of Lake Tahoe, but his great forte, like that of Artemus Ward, is his sustained irony, and this reaches its perfection when, at the end of his description of horrors, he grimly expresses a hope that he has not said anything which might tend to depopulate England, through a vast emigration to Nevada. (“Mr. Mark Twain,” 12 Dec 73, 5, clipping in Scrapbook 12:45, CU-MARK)

well received, but scarcely so heartily as the famous lecture on the Fiji Islands. The audience seemed to become accustomed to the speaker’s tricks of style, and to find them less amusing the oftener they were repeated. He has some genuine humour; but it is of an elementary kind, consisting for the most part of grotesque exaggeration.

delivered by Mark Twain they often excite hearty laughter. He is a capital speaker, free, sympathetic, and self-confident; and he has the first essential of a good platform orator—he never laughs at his own jokes. Last night he seemed more than once the only perfectly grave person in the hall. (“Mark Twain’s Second Lecture,” 9 Dec 73, clipping in Scrapbook 12:51, CU-MARK)

It is dense, woolly, sticky, and full of small floating particles of smut, that settle upon your face, hands, collar and cuffs, and spoil your personal appearance inside of twenty minutes. It is yellow as furnace smoke—it is furnace smoke to a great degree. . . . The Concert Rooms were hermetically sealed during the day, but at night, when the audience gathered, the fog trailed in, dimming the gaslights and flooding the place with a vague gloom. . . .

There was an evening of fog at the close of a day during which the street-lamps had in vain struggled to light the bewildered citizens through the chaotic city. At high noon linkboys bore their flaming torches to and fro; and the air was burdened with the ceaseless cries of cabmen who were all adrift, and in danger of a collapse and total wreck at the imminent lamp-post. . . . Mark began his lecture on this occasion with a delicate allusion to the weather, and said: “Perhaps you can’t see me, but I am here!” (Stoddard 1903, 67, 68–69)