He accordingly produced the biography which had so much success.

Judged solely as literature, the book is beneath contempt.
The style is turgid, overloaded, and at times silly.

The statements are loose, the mode of narration confused and incoherent, and the moralizing is flat and common-place to the last degree.

Yet there was a certain sincerity of feeling underneath all the bombast and platitudes, and this saved the book.

The biography did not go, and was not intended to go, into the hands of the polite society of the great eastern towns.