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Rh peculiar to the Americans and the Provincials.

Following the popular success of the papers, a small bound edition was put out by Howe, and later by Bentley of London. Other Sam Slick books were added, but not until the author went to England did he announce himself as the progenitor of the "first Yankee of literature." He himself was called by Artemus Ward, "the founder of the American school of humour." Said a critic in La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1850, "Haliburton is a caricaturist as good as Dickens, better than Thackeray." The London Illustrated News thought his Sam Slick Sayings "one of the few really original productions of the day." An American edition of The Clockmaker, published in New York and sold at five cents the copy, bears this encomium on the paper cover: "Sam Slick the Clockmaker is a recognised American humorous classic; it is still more—it is part of American history, like the Biglow Papers of James Russell Lowell, affording pictures of life and character, representing a time and a class better than they can be found depicted, probably in any other book." Among the dissenters from this rule of praise which governed nearly all the humorous works of Haliburton was a critic in the North American Review of 1844, who declared Sam Slick "badly conceived . . . no proper representative of the Yankees . . . an impostor, an