The Eagle's Shadow: A Fiction and Literature, Romance Classic By James Branch Cabell! AAA+++

James Branch Cabell was one of the great ironists of twentieth-century fantastic literature. His avowed aim "to write perfectly of beautiful happenings" was usually deceptive; the writing was wittily elegant but the beauty often bleak and austere. Cabell's finest works all acknowledge the emptiness or unattainability of most human ideals, and the inexorable ravages of time, with the happiest permitted outcome often being the return of the hero through a closed circle of story to the place (and sometimes even the moment) from which he set out.