Haliburton, "probably the first original Canadian writer in English" [CGEL], was a judge who became a humorist and satirist (also, in 1829 he had written the account of Nova Scotia that became the source for Longfellow's EVANGELINE). He is best known for his adventures of Sam Slick, the wandering Yankee clockmaker (based on an actual case Haliburton heard, involving a peddler from the States who swindled farmers by selling them clocks that didn't work). "On the whole he [Slick] was a slangy, under-bred, vulgar, energetic, shrewd, cunning rogue... usually his speech is epigrammatic, rich in picturesque slang, and brilliantly amusing" [K&H]. According to Artemus Ward, the Nova Scotian Haliburton was the founder of the American school of humor; certainly with his homespun philosophy and frontier humor, he was a major literary progenitor of Mark Twain.

THE ATTACHE was published in the same cloth and style that Bentley had used for OLIVER TWIST six years earlier. This is a remarkably fine copy, with scarcely any wear; as always with this color cloth the spines are sunned, and the front endpapers are cracked. Not in Sadleir nor Wolff.