ell to go about enjoying it with a certain caution. The reader
must not expect always to agree with Peacock, who not only did not
always agree with himself, but was also a man of almost ludicrously
strong prejudices. He hated paper money; whereas the only feeling that
most of us have on that subject is that we have not always as much of it
as we should like. He hated Scotchmen, and there are many of his readers
who without any claim to Scotch blood, but knowing the place and the
people, will say,

That better wine and better men
We shall not meet in May,

or for the matter of that in any other month. Partly because he hated
Scotchmen, and partly because in his earlier days Sir Walter was a
pillar of Toryism, he hated Scott, and has been guilty not merely of an
absurd and no doubt partly humorous comparison of the Waverley novels to
pantomimes, but of more definite criticisms which will bear the test of
examination as badly. His strictures on a famous verse of "The Dream of
Fair Women" are indefensible, though there is perhaps more to be said
for the accompanying gibe at Sir John Millais's endeavour to carry out
the description of Cleopatra in black (chiefly black) and white. The
reader of Peacock must never mind his author trampling on his, the
reader's, favourite corns; or rather he must lay his account with the
agreeable certainty that Peacock will shortly afterwards trample on
other corns which are not at all his favourites. For my part I am quite
willing to accept these conditions. And I do not find that my admiration
for Coleridge, and my sympathy with those who opposed the first Reform
Bill, and my inclination to dispute the fact that Oxford is only a place
of "unread books," make me like Peacock one whit the less. It is the law
of the game, and those who play the game must put up with its laws. And
it must be remembered that, at any rate in his later and best books,
Peacock never wholly "took a side." He has always provided some
personage or other who reduces all the whimsies and prejudices of his
characters, even including his own, under a kind of dry light. Such is
Lady Clarinda, who regards all the crotcheteers of Crotchet Castle with
the same benevolent amusement; such Mr. McBorrowdale, who, when he is
requested to settle the question of the superiority or inferiority of
Greek harmony and perspective to modern, replies, "I think ye may just
buz that bottle before you." (Alas! to think that if a man u