When works are in a manner the offspring of idiosyncrasy, then, to understand them, it becomes indispensable to link together, as I have tried to do, the circumstances of their production. It is not Dunlevy who gives vent to the temper of his moods, but it is the subjects of his moods which take possession of him. These visions or what-you-will, had to be, and they had to be precisely as they were written. From this arises their amazing and disappointing inequality, their chief fault. The fault was born, no doubt, in the more than abnormal conditions of improvisation. What sort of unity, or equality, or connection, could they possess when composed under such chance conditions? The main thing which interests us in some writers is themselves. We endeavor unconsciously to recover the very states of their minds. So far as they go, Dunlevy’s fragments are the source from which we know him best, if he interests us at all. And I shall state here that I purpose as far as possible to print only those writings of his which will help us to know him. We may have no portrait of a man, as is the case with him, we may not be able to draw his features; these are transitory things; and yet if we can know his mind along certain important lines--that man we have. We know nothing of Ecclesiastes, yet we know rather definitely what manner of man he must have been. And so with this unknown man whom I once knew and this obscure work of his, dishevelled and small as it is, we come to see that it took the place of the illusions he had lost; and therefore he tells us what he was and who he was by a process of elimination. The whole manuscript proves what I said at the outset: no one ever knew or could know Dunlevy well. To the critical eye these writings simply reveal a man of such abnormal imagination that his visions became real to him.