In particular, Haliburton justifies his sentential structure on psychological grounds. In _Wise Saws_ he says that he purposely designed the structure and rhythms of his sentences so that their length and abrupt translations would spur the mind to attention, and that he employed a conversational style and dialogue to create interest and keep the attention alive. He wished his works, since they had a utilitarian end, to be read by all classes. He resolved to adapt the style of his works to assuring their popularity—‘in the parlor and the kitchen.’ His themes were discursive and therefore he resolved that the stylistic treatment should be discursive. So Haliburton consciously employed a style which, by novelty of dress, by being written in natural language and illustrated with droll humor, and which by colloquial sentential structure would, like ‘oral chat,’ sustain interest or excite attention, and inevitably be read in the parlor and the kitchen. ‘Why is it,’ asks Sam Slick in the _Wise Saws_, ‘if you _read_ a book to a man you set him asleep? Just because it is a book and the language ain’t common. Why is it if you _talk_ to him he will sit up all night with you? Just because it’s talk, the language of natur’.’ Haliburton’s humoristic or utilitarian prose style is justified, as he himself justified it, by its successful adaption of means to end. In his ‘Apologia’ he noted the ‘unprecedented circulation’ of his works on ‘both sides of the Atlantic.’ He wrote _The Clockmaker_ in a people’s style for people’s ends, and the style, in his own view, admirably succeeded. We must therefore hold that academic criticism which scores Haliburton’s humoristic style on the ground that it is loose, prolix, repetitious, digressive, vulgar, colloquial, that it is not ‘_fine_ style,’ commits the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. In the writing of humoristic, utilitarian, conversational style, precisely adapted to its end, Haliburton was a master. But he was also, at least on occasion or whenever he essayed fine style, as in his descriptive prose, especially of Nature, an artist of first rank, worthy of a place beside Ruskin, Stevenson, and Hardy. As regards Haliburton’s aesthetic style we may instance as example of graphic realism in ‘local color’ his description of the dress and characteristics of an Acadian people (_Nature and Human Nature_) and of a Low German people (_The Old Judge_). An example of his fine artistry in painting social life is his idyllic picture of the home of Captain Collingwood’s sister, Aunt Thankful (_Wise Saws_). As a picture of the sweet and gracious social life in old colonial days, it is a masterpiece. But for sheer pathos of ‘thoughts that lie too deep for tears,’ Haliburton’s description of the Duke of Kent’s Lodge, against a background of Nature (_The Clockmaker_, third series), is worthy of Ruskin or Hardy.