is work has been allowed to lie wholly neglected,
unmentioned, and apparently unregretted, for nearly half a century.

The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy,
fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form,
purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of
statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent
narrative, connected sequence of events--or philosophy, or logic, or
sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm of the book lies in the total
and miraculous ABSENCE from it of all these qualities--a charm which is
completed and perfected by the evident fact that the author, whose naive
innocence easily and surely wins our regard, and almost our worship,
does not know that they are absent, does not even suspect that they are
absent. When read by the light of these helps to an understanding of the
situation, the book is delicious--profoundly and satisfyingly delicious.

I call it a book because the author calls it a book, I call it a work
because he calls it a work; but, in truth, it is merely a duodecimo
pamphlet of thirty-one pages. It was written for fame and money, as the
author very frankly--yes, and very hopefully, too, poor fellow--says
in his preface. The money never came--no penny of it ever came; and how
long, how pathetically long, the fame has been deferred--forty-seven
years! He was young then, it would have been so much to him then; but
will he care for it now?

As time is measured in America, McClintock's epoch is antiquity. In his
long-vanished day the Southern author had a passion for "eloquence";
it was his pet, his darling. He would be eloquent, or perish. And he
recognized only one kind of eloquence--the lurid, the tempestuous, the
volcanic. He liked words--big words, fine words, grand words, rumbling,
thundering, reverberating words; with sense attaching if it could be got
in without marring the sound, but not otherwise. He loved to stand
up before a dazed world, and pour forth flame and smoke and lava and
pumice-stone into the skies, and work his subterranean thunders, and
shake himself with earthquakes, and stench himself with sulphur fumes.
If he consumed his own fields and vineyards, that was a pity, yes; but
he would have his eruption at any cost. Mr. McClintock's eloquence--and
he is always eloquent, his crater is always spouting--is of the pattern
common to his day, but he departs from the custom