So I said all this in a review which I have here more or less exactly iterated. I count myself to-day fortunate that this review achieved a brief bewildering sort of fame. Virtuosi thought well of it, it was quoted with approval by the literary editors of the leading papers of Des Moines and Walla Walla and Mobile. It seemed, indeed, to be reprinted illimitably in papers everywhere throughout the country, so that The Nation's honorarium but visited me in transit to the bank account of my clipping bureau. And the publishers reproduced this review at full length in their advertisements, and reproduced it, again virtually at full length, upon the novel's dust jacket.... I could open no periodical wherein reading-matter was advertised without encountering the proclamation, "James Branch Cabell says _Messer Marco Polo_ is a very magically beautiful book." At first the phrase read like a ukase, it had the full and final ring of an imperial decree: later, with so constant repetition, it began to take on somehow the flavor of a taunt, and I would read on a bit further, in the next advertisement, hurriedly.... And people wrote to me about my pæans, some to thank me for, as they put it, "discovering" the novel for them, and some of course to rebuke me as the member of a petty clique of assassins, atheists and tomb-defilers who combined thus shamelessly to puff one another's books. And in fine there was rarely seen so much bombilation over any one brief and not especially remarkable criticism, whose only striking characteristics were the dubious ones of enthusiasm and sincerity. But this to-do had the merit of drawing people's attention to _Messer Marco Polo_ and of provoking people to read this small novel. And many thousands joyed in the reading of it, very much as I had done. For here again was the true formula and the hero with whom mankind peculiarly delights in imagination to identify itself,--the hero who wanders footloose and at adventure through lands which are to him and to the reader in nothing familiar. It is the formula of the _Odyssey_, the formula of picaresque romance, and of all fairy stories properly equipped with quests and an indomitable third prince. It is of course precisely the one formula which cannot ever lose its charm so long as men retain that frame of mind which seems coeval with recorded history, of being bored by the routine of their daily living.... And people also found in _Messer Marco Polo_ just the quality I had ascribed to this book, the quality which I have vaguely indicated as wizardry. § 20