ABSTRACT
But for the Introduction to this book, we should have little difficulty in assigning it its proper place in literature. We should say at once that the author was draping himself in the garb of one of those typical Yankee tourists of whom we hear so often, and whom we do meet occasionally,-the tourists who 'do' Europe in six •veeks,-whose comment on Venice is that they do not care much for those old towns, and on the Venus de' Medici that they do not like them stone gals. If we thought at all about the name on the title-page, we should put it down as a pseudonym, though the probability is that we should not think about it. Anyhow, we should come to the conclusion that Mark Twain, whoever he might be, had hit off the oddities of some of his countrymen very well; that many of his remarks were amusing, and almost witty; and that he was certainly not such a fool as he tried to look. But when Mr. Hingston tells us seriously that Mark Twain is really the pseudonym of the sub-editor of a daily paper in a Western city a few months old, that he is a flower of the wilderness, a thoroughly untravelled American applying the standard of Nevada to historical Europe, we are fairly puzzled. We can readily believe that the writer of this book is ignorant of many of those things which would be familiar to an English tourist. His remark that 'Raphael, Angelo, Canova-giants like these gave birth to the designs' of the statues on the Cathedral at Milan, is not much more than the hasty generalization of one who takes his f.1cts from guides and guide-books. The statement that 'Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine de' Medici se:~ted in heaven :~nd conversing f.1miliarly with the Virgin Mary and
the angels,' may surprise those who remember that Catherine de' Medici was only born one year before the death of Raphael. Again, we are told that Raphael is buried in Santa Croce, instead of in the Pantheon; but we may conclude from this that in Mark Twain's opinion every great artist should be buried in several places, just as each relic of a saint is multiplied. We owe this suggestion to what Mark Twain says of an important fellow-passenger calling himself Commissioner of the United States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa. The comment on this 'titular avalanche' is, 'to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in better taste and safer to take him apart and cart him over in sections in several ships.'
