" The Major grasped him by the hand,
and exclaimed: "O! thou exalted spirit of inspiration--thou flame
of burning prosperity, may the Heaven-directed blaze be the glare
of thy soul, and battle down every rampart that seems to impede
your progress!"
There is a strange sort of originality about McClintock;
he imitates other people's styles, but nobody can imitate his,
not even an idiot. Other people can be windy, but McClintock blows
a gale; other people can blubber sentiment, but McClintock spews it;
other people can mishandle metaphors, but only McClintock knows
how to make a business of it. McClintock is always McClintock,
he is always consistent, his style is always his own style. He does
not make the mistake of being relevant on one page and irrelevant
on another; he is irrelevant on all of them. He does not make
the mistake of being lucid in one place and obscure in another;
he is obscure all the time. He does not make the mistake of slipping
in a name here and there that is out of character with his work;
he always uses names that exactly and fantastically fit his lunatics.
In the matter of undeviating consistency he stands alone in authorship.
It is this that makes his style unique, and entitles it to a name
of its own--McClintockian. It is this that protects it from being
mistaken for anybody else's. Uncredited quotations from other writers
often leave a reader in doubt as to their authorship, but McClintock
is safe from that accident; an uncredited quotation from him would
always be recognizable.
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