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The question of how long he will last as a humorist, or how long he will dominate all other humorists in the affection of his fellow-men, is something that must have concerned Mark Twain in his life on earth. If he still lives in some other state, the question does not concern him so much, except as he would be loath to see good work forgotten; but, as he once lived here, it must have concerned him intensely because he loved beyond almost any other man to make the world sit up and look and listen. The question of his lasting primacy is something that now remains for us survivors of him to answer, each according to his thinking; and it renews itself in our case with unexpected force from the reading of Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine's story of his personal and literary life. Of course, if we are moderately honest and candid, we must all try to shirk the question, for it would be a kind of arrogant hypocrisy to pretend that we had any of us a firm conviction on the point. For our own part, the Easy Chair's part, we prefer only to say that if the world ever ceased to love and to value his humor it would do so to its peculiar loss, for, as we have always held, the humor of no other is so mixed with good-will to humanity, and especially to that part of humanity which most needs kindness. Beyond this we should not care to go in prophecy, and in trying to guess Mark Twain's future from the past of other humorists we should not care to be comparative. There are only three or four whom he may be likened with, and, not to begin with the ancients, we may speak in the same breath of Cervantes, of Moliere, of Swift, of Dickens, among the moderns. None of these may be compared with him in humanity except Dickens alone, whose humanity slopped into sentimentality, and scarcely counts more than the others'. But Dickens even surpassed Mark Twain in characterizing and coloring the speech of his time. We who read Dickens in his heyday not only read him we talked him, and slavishly reverberated his phrase when we wished to be funny. No one does that today, and no one ever did that with Mark Twain. Such a far inferior humorist as Artemus Ward stamped the utterance of his contemporaries measurably as much as Dickens and much more than Mark Twain, but this did not establish him in the popular consciousness of posterity; it was of no more lasting effect than the grotesqueries of Petroleum V. Nasby, or than the felicities of baseball parlance which Mr. George Ade has so satisfyingly reported. The remembrance of Mark Twain does not depend upon the presence of a like property in his humor, and its absence has little to do with the question which we have been inviting the reader to evade with us. After all, we are more concerned with a man's past than with his future; and we can more usefully delight in what Cervantes and Moliere and Swift and Dickens did and suffered than in vain conjecture of what men will say of them hereafter. Possibly because he is more germane to the American argument than any European or than any other American, we can have more pleasure in the story of Mark Twain than in theirs, but we think we can have a peculiar pleasure in it because it is among the most interesting stories ever lived and one of the most interesting ever told.