ery common disease
of youth, pretty early--he certainly had never been a democrat. Even his
earlier satire is double-edged; and, as must be constantly repeated and
remembered, it was always his taste and his endeavour to shoot folly
as it flew, to attack existent and not extinct forms of popular or
fashionable delusion. Such follies, whether in 1860 or since, have
certainly not as a rule been of the aristocratic, monarchical, or Tory
order generally.

He found plenty of these follies, however, in the other kind--the kind
which he had begun to satirise smartly in _Crotchet Castle_--and he
showed pretty decisively that his hand had not lost its cunning, nor his
sword its sharpness. The satire, though partly, is not mainly political;
and it is an interesting detail (though it only refreshes the memory of
those who knew the facts then or have studied them since) that barely
she years before a far more sweeping reform than that of 1832, a very
acute judge who disliked and resisted it spoke of 'another reform
lunacy' as 'not likely to arise in his time.' And these words, it
must be remembered, are put in the mouth of Mr. MacBorrowdale, who is
represented as merely middle-aged.

It is fortunate, however, for the interest of _Gryll Grange_ that
politics, in the strict sense, occupy so small a part of it; for of all
subjects they lose interest first to all but a very select number of
readers. The bulk of the satiric comment of the book is devoted either
to purely social matters, or to the debateable land between these and
politics proper. A little but not very much of this is obsolete or
obsolescent. American slavery is no more; and the 'Pantopragmatic
Society' (in official language the Social Science Congress) has ceased
to exist as a single recognised institution. But there is not much about
slavery here, and if pantopragmatics have lost their special Society
they flourish more than ever as a general and fashionable subject of
human attention. You shall not open a number of the _Times_ twice,
perhaps not once in a week, without finding columns of debate, harangue,
or letter-writing purely pantopragmatical.

Still more is this the case with another subject which has even more
attention, and on which what some think the central and golden sentence
of the book is laid down by Dr. Opimian in the often-quoted words, 'If
all the nonsense which in the last quarter of a century [it is appalling
to think that this quarter is getting