The extravagantly impossible situation may have been taken over from the Densmore perversion; but the handling of it, the expressing out of it of all the humor it might be made to contain, that, we may be sure, was the doing of Mark himself. No one else could have done it.
Forty years ago and more I pointed out, in an article on the ‘American on the Stage’ that in so far as Colonel Sellers was a schemer, with an incessant activity in devising new methods for making money, he had been anticipated by a character in Ben Jonson’s the ‘Devil is an Ass’—added evidence of the kinship of the descendants of the Puritans with the daring Elizabethan adventurers. Where the American proposed a liniment for the sore eyes so multitudinous in the Orient and saw “millions in it!” the Elizabethan had advocated a device for making wine of raisins:
What hast thou there?
O, “Making wine of Raisins”; this is in hand now.
Yes, and as true a wine as the wines of France,
Or Spain or Italy: look of what grape
My raisin is, that wine I’ll render perfect,
As of the Muscatel grape, I’ll render Muscatel;
Of the Canary, his; the claret, his;
So of all kinds; and bate you of the prices