As to the originality of Haliburton’s chief character, Sam Slick, the truth is that the humorist created, on a realistic basis, a transcript of the ‘composite’ order, the main outline being derived from a real peddler-clockmaker, named Seth, familiar in Nova Scotia, and from Haliburton’s own coachman, Lennie Geldert, and a friend Judge Peleg Wiswell, who were ‘smart’ in wit and who were first-rate _raconteurs_. Haliburton also had as material the stage peddler who had made his appearance in dramatic literature as early as 1811, and who by 1830 was a stock character of the acted drama, having the same comic function as the stage Irishman of the late Victorian age. Neither Sam Slick himself nor his conversational dialect were absolute inventions of Haliburton, but were based on a real and living dialect and character. He employed his creative faculties in giving the one a humorous piquancy and liveliness and the other the individuality and reality of a real person; so that Sam Slick remains as one of the immortal characters of fiction. But the slightest reflection reveals the fact that Sam Slick is not a _single_ person of many characteristics, not a _type_ of character, but a _composite_ creation, the _epitome_ of so many distinct and contradictory traits that they could not reside in a single person but only in persons. Sam Slick, in short, was conceived and drawn to personify _a people_, and his characteristics are an immanent criticism or satirizing of the virtues and vices of republican democracy. What is Sam Slick? He is a disreputable plebeian creature—slangy, coarse, conceited, boastful, mendacious, irreverent, yet shrewd, wise, practical, acute in perception of social and political ideals, courageous, self-reliant, quick-witted, critical of standards and values, frank in speech, and direct in action. What does he represent? Haliburton’s conception of _typical Americanism_. What was he designed to achieve? Haliburton aimed to present in the character, sayings, and doings of Sam Slick, the _reductio ad absurdum_ of republican culture, institutions and civilization in America.