And what a sweet and graceful and gracious speech you made the other night!—All sense of that and of other things was long blotted out for me by that hideous mistake of poor Clemens’s. As you have more than once expressed a kindness for him, you will like to know that before he had fairly touched his point, he felt the awfulness of what he was doing, but was fatally helpless to stop. He was completely crushed by it, and though it killed the joy of the time for me, I pitied him; for he has a good and reverent nature for good things, and his performance was like an effect of demonical possession. The worst of it was, I couldn’t see any retrieval for him. (Howells 1979, 182)

a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper report of it, praising Clemens’s burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in Clemens’s soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it, by giving the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child’s note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. (Howells 1968, 296–97)