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.