In this erstwhile satire, Twain rails against the monarchy, the church, and bureaucracy - the last mostly by drowning the reader in it. To show the pointlessness of battling knights, he fills pages with tedious descriptions of these battles. The brutal ending was all too prescient of world war I, still 25 years in the future.

There is wit here, but it is sparse and usually directed against the church or the monarchy. Many passages of plot are drawn directly from Sir Thomas Malory, and the whole section on hermits from another author. The rest of the story about the dried up holy well is quite good; I wonder if it was published earlier.

This book has been adapted to stage and screen many times, though I'm afraid the only one I've seen is Chuck Jones' "A Connecticut Rabbit...". Coincidentally, I've just started Carl Sagan's Contact, and the protagonist is seen reading this book. I hope she got more out of it than me. If this is exemplary of Twain's later writings, I'll stick with jumping frog stories.