THIS TIME NOT
Whole World Quick to Give
Him High Place in Literature
HIS TRUE AMERICANISM
England Calls Him Most Popular
Writer There Since Dickens
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
The world today is voicing the thought which seems simultaneously to have come to call, that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), the report of whose death at his home in Redding, Conn., this time is not "exaggerated," was the foremost figure in an important field of literature -- the American school of letters.
In estimating Mark Twain's place in English literature, the dead humorist today is most frequently mentioned in connection with another great American, Abraham Lincoln, for the significant reason that both expressed so characteristically the pure American spirit.
"The American Chaucer" is the London Evening Standard's estimate of Twain's position in literature.
"Like Chaucer," it says, "he kept a hospitable heart for what was good and healthy. Since the death of Charles Dickens no writer of English has been so universally read, and at the moment of his death Mark Twain was known as only one other living writer was known. Mark Twain and Count Tolstoi are inheritors of world-wide fame."
"He was not only a great humorist, but a great philosopher, and his writings form one of the assets in America's contribution to the world of achievement of which we have a right as a nation to be genuinely proud."
In the pigskin library which Mr. Roosevelt carried through the jungles of Africa were two of the late author's books, "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," and Mr. Roosevelt says that he read both of them several times and always with the greatest interest.
[The story goes on for 36 more paragraphs, quoting Howells, citing anecdotes by and about MT, etc.]