s and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
Peacock with _Gryll Grange_, in order that he may not be set out of
harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of _Headlong Hall_
and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
this latest novel.

I have no space here to go through the miscellaneous work which
completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
them.

Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock--the easy
joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
science--though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
antiquity--wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock is a
differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
singi