William J. Grayson, lawyer, politician, congressman, government official, Charleston man of letters, southern gentleman, and staunch defender of neoclassicism and all things that promote stability and order, was born not in Charleston, South Carolina, but in the next best place for entrance into South Carolina plantation society, Beaufort, South Carolina, on 12 November 1788. As a literary critic he earns a short chapter in Edd Winfield Parks's Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics (1962) under the subtitle "Neo-Classicist," as a die-hard adherent of neoclassicism in a romantic age. He appeared as a critic late in his career at a time and place where romanticism was, at long last, dominant. He might be regarded as eccentric but not unique, since the South held to neoclassical tenets longer than the North, and the Charleston professional man with literary tastes, educated in the classics and Scottish common sense philosophy, upheld these beliefs the most tenaciously. As...