The Marquis of Lorne, then Governor-General of Canada, was the husband
of Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Louise. The invitation was
therefore in the nature of a command. Clemens obeyed it graciously
enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. He had been honored
by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--English
royalty--paying a tribute to an American writer whom neither the Marquis
nor the Princess, his wife, had ever seen. They had invited him because
they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him,
to have him as a guest in Rideau Hall, their home. Mark Twain was
democratic. A king to him was no more than any other man; rather less
if he were not a good king. But there was something national in this
tribute; and, besides, Lord Lorne and the Princess Louise were the kind
of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it.
It is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted
boy of Hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed
miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of
America's foremost men of letters. The honor was no greater than many
others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of
Canon Kingsley and Robert Browning and Turgenieff at his London hotel
lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind.
Clemens enjoyed his visit. Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne kept
him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. Once
they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience.
It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian
Parliament took place. Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state
entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess
Louise with Mark Twain. As they approached the Parliament House
the customary salute was fired. Clemens pretended to the Princess
considerable gratification. The temptation was too strong to resist:
“Your Highness,” he said, “I have had other compliments paid to me,
but none equal to this one. I have never before had a salute fired
in my honor.”
Returning to Hartford, he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to
the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of
the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written
an introduction.--[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood
['83) as a joke. Clemens in the introduction says: “Its delicious,
unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and
unapproachable in their way as Shakespeare's sublimities.” An extract,
the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his
meaning:
“We expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him,
and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation
of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we
dedicate him particularly.”]