In Defence of Harriet Shelley

I have committed sins, of course; but I have not committed enough of them to entitle me to the punishment of reduction to the bread and water of ordinary literature during six years when I might have been living on the fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Dowden's Life of
Shelley, if I had been justly dealt with.
An 1897 essay of Mark Twain (a pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens), a famous American humorist and novelist, the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. This work appears