You recall the method. First, they admit certain facts—for picturesque effect. For example, these settlers of the Golden West, they say, included a few decent men, but they were in great part the riffraff of the world—foreign adventurers, offscourings of Eastern cities, uncouth, red-shirted illiterates from the Middle States, lawless, dirty, tobacco-spitting, blaspheming, drunken, horse-thieves, murderers, and gamblers. And then, with noble poetic vision, they cry: 'But what delicacy of sentiment beneath those shaggy bosoms! What generosity and chivalry under those old red shirts! Horse-thieves, yet nature's noblemen! Gamblers and drunkards, yet kings of men!' 'I say to you,' chants 'the poet of the Sierras,' 'that there is nothing in the pages of history so glorious, so entirely grand, as the lives of these noble Spartan fathers and mothers of Americans, who begot and brought forth and bred the splendid giants of the generation that is now fast following the setting sun of their unselfish and all immortal lives.'
Here is the point of view of the Jacksonian democracy in its romantic mood. This, in general, was the point of view of Mark Twain, the most original force in American letters and, on the whole, the most broadly representative
