Carlyle told me that the first bound book of his he ever saw came to him by mail from New England, and presently Mark Twain may say that the last bound book of his was sent him from Old England. It is, as I think, the most notable work which Mark Twain has yet written, and will signally add to his reputation for variety of powers. His dramatis personae are mainly some boys and girls residing in the magnificently small village of St. Petersburg, somewhere on the Missouri, the Czar of which village is Tom Sawyer, who settled his western questions more satisfactorily, I suspect, than the chief of the larger St. Petersburg is likely to settle in his Eastern one. However, this is but a small part, however valuable to certain minds, of the interest of this work.
Children report the past and foreshadow the future.
The boy is a savage, and then a Viking and a pirate in his tastes, a nomad in his love adventure, and passing through the age of the huntsman, affects agriculture and mechanic art for a time, becomes a knight errant, and so advances to be an Englishman. These embryological states of development are very marked at some points. It requires the utmost vigilance to prevent them from doing this in the little gardens of London. Many a boy and girl here will feel an agony of envy when they contemplate the scene of Mark Twain's three boys painted with mud to look like Indians racing up and down the beach to their heart's content. Many other scenes and notions, too, will correspond to the familiar feelings of the healthy British boy and girl.