But assassination began for Lincoln
an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and
adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in American public life;
and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark
Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive
development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of
intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his
career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of
Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a
merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy
navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be
taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.
With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral
glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those
other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the
name of Clemens.
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