'He had a soul beyond the vulgar reach,
Sun-ripened, swarthy. He was not the fool
To pluck the feeble lily from its shade,
When the black hyacinth stood in fragrance by

The lady of his love was dark as Ind,
Her lips as plenteous as the Sphinx's are,
And her short hair crisp with Numidian curl:
She was a negress!'

But while justice is thus done to the peculiar genius of Firmilian the poet, that of Apollodorus the critic is not defrauded of its due. He enters on the scene soliloquizing in this fashion : —

Why do men call me a presumptuous cur, A vapouring blockhead, and a turgid fool, A common nuisance, and a charlatan? I've dashed into the sea of metaphor, With as strong paddles as the sturdiest ship That churns Medusa into liquid light, And hashed at every object in my way. I have reviewed myself incessantly.'

Firmilian no doubt helped to explode the now almost forgotten nonsense at which it was levelled. The spasmodic school' no longer exists as a school; and any single member of it who has reached any position in letters has done so by emancipating himself from the absurdities of his youth. Unluckily, in some cases in which the extravagance was thought to be a mere excess of power, it has turned out that the power resided only in the extravagance. When the spasmodic poet has begun to write like other people, he has written worse.

·

Aytoun enjoyed no little convivial renown in his youth, for the same humour which belongs to his writing belonged to his conversation. So late as at the time of Thackeray's last visit to Edinburgh he made a capital mot. He told Thackeray that he did not like his Georges' nearly so well as his Jeameses.' But in his later years a kind of mysterious langour came over him. He had suffered the most dreadful pain inflicted on mortals by any weapon in the armoury of doom - the untimely loss of a beloved wife, -Jane Emily Wilson, the youngest daughter of Professor Wilson, whom he married in 1849. His health failed, not abruptly, but gradually; and he seemed to lose his relish for society, and his interest in human pursuits. His characteristic face, with its vellowish beard, and the deep-seated twinkle of fun in its eyes, retained its interest; but he looked thin and feeble about the legs,

stride. He rallied, however, and entered into a second marriage. But the amendment was not permanent; and he died at a house which he was renting in Morayshire brother, Aytoun was at all periods of life in the August of last year. As a son and beyond praise; he was much liked by his old intimates, and those who knew him in his best years; and if nothing worthy of his memory or of his Scottish popularity has it is some satisfaction to know that his suryet been written about him in Edinburgh, viving friend Mr. Theodore Martin intends to supply the deficiency.*

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We now turn to the English member of our triad of humorists, Thomas Love Peacock, author of Headlong Hall,' Crotchet Castle,' and other pleasant and clever books - all bearing that cachet of a distinctive character and intellect in the writer, which is the unfailing accompaniment of really superior parts. In these days, when so many 'twaddling essays' are written, and when the pleasantry of our younger wags is too often mere Cockney garbage, we recur with delight to the vivid satire, manly sense, and brilliant scholarship of this distinguished, but not sufficiently known author. Mr. Peacock survived Aytoun; but he was already before the world when Aytoun first entered into it. He was born at Weymouth on the 13th October 1785, being the only child of Mr. Samuel Peacock, a London Merchant, by Sarah, daughter of Mr. Thomas Love, who lost a leg as Master of H. M. S. Prothee,' in Rodney's action in 1782.† The father of Mr. Peacock died early; and his mother removed to Chertsey, from whence he was sent to a boarding-school at Englefield Green, kept by a Mr. Dix, who was very proud of him. The lad loved books from the beginning, and even in his holidays delighted to read by the river-side, or in Windsor Forest - scenes which he continued to haunt all his life. When he was sixteen his mother settled in London, and Peacock received no further education. But Mr. Dix had evidently grounded his pupil well, for he went on closely studying the ancient writers at the British Museum; and it is certain that he was one of the men best read in the classics of his generation.

*Mr. Martin's Memoir of Professor Aytoun is to be prefixed to a collection of his best prose writings. of the Adjutant-General's Office, for obtaining us some particulars of the life of his friend Mr. Peacock. We are also indebted to the distinguished painter Mr. Wallis, for the loan of an excellent portrait of him; and Mr. George Meredith has likewise favoured us with some reminiscences.

We must express our thanks here to Mr. Howes

Though autodidaktоs he was not puans, and therefore not obnoxious to the remark of Cicero that the buaves are insolentes.' But he took a waggish pleasure always in baving a hit at the universities, which he said did nothing for the classics but print German editions of them on better paper.' His youth was studious throughout. When his day had been spent at the noble library in Bloomsbury, he would devote his evening to reading aloud to his mother, a woman of superior understanding. He loved her as Gray and Thomas Brown loved their mothers, with a love beyond that of common natures. He consulted her judgment on all that he wrote; and some time after her death, he remarked to a friend that he had never written with any zeal since.

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Peacock began his literary career with poetry. He published a poem called Palmyra,' as early as 1806, and another, The Genius of the Thames,' in 1812. When Shelley saw them both in the last mentioned year, he took care to protest against the doctrine that 'commerce is prosperity,' or that the glory of the British flag is the happiness of the British people,' which he had found in the Genius of the Thames.' But he praised their genius, information, and power,' and went so far as to say that he thought the conclusion of Palmyra' the finest piece of poetry he had ever read.' 'A personal acquaintance followed, and in 1813 Peacock was Shelley's guest. He is a very mild agreeable man,' writes Shelley to Hogg,* in the November of that year, and a good scholar. His enthusiasm is not very ardent, nor his views very comprehensive: but he is neither superstitious, ill-tempered, dogmatical, nor proud. Some of the queer people whom Shelley had about him in those days, and who figure in Mr. Hogg's eccentric but instructive book, did not like Peacock as well as Shelley did. They have made an, addition to their party,' Miss Cornelia Ntells Mr. Hogg, in the person of a cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling.' The fact was that Peacock had too much sense, and too sharp an eye for humbug, to be agreeable to the enthusiasts and sham-enthusiasts, who were then preying on and stimulating Shelley's weaknesses. It would have been well for the poet if he had had more such friends as Peacock instead of them. But he naturally knew a gentleman and a scholar when he saw him. The acquaintance continued; and Peacock accompanied the Shelleys on one of their journeys to Edinburgh. There is gener

*Hogg's Shelley, ii. 482.

ally a Scotchman in Peacock's novels, which we must attribute doubtless to this visit. The first of the novels in question was Headlong Hall,' which appeared in 1816, and to the type of which all its successors approximate more or less nearly. We know what the fashionable novel of 1866 is

either a photograph of commonplace life by an artist who sets up his camera at the drawing-room door as mechanically as his brother artist at Mayall's; or a literary Chinese puzzle, made up of all imaginable complications of crimes committed by stupidly unnatural puppets fobbed off on us for characters. The Peacockian novel is something quite different. It is a sort of comedy in the form of a novel, making very little pretension to story, or to subtle character-painting, but illustrating the intellectual opinions and fashions of the day in capital dialogues; natural even in its most comic freedoms, and full of wit, satire, literature, and playfulness of every kind. Peacock had a favourite set of dramatis personce, who reappear with more or less variety in most of his books. There is a cultivated squire, whose mansion forms a rendezvous for the company, and whose daughters or lady visitors supply occasion for the only half-serious lovemaking of the story. There is a parson of the old school, sometimes merely remarkable for eating and drinking, but generally a classical scholar and wit into the bargain. There is a Scotch philosopher of the Edinburgh Review type. And there are representatives of all the pet schools of speculation and sentiment in his day: the phrenologist; the Byronic misanthrope; the Coleridgian mystic; the perfectibility of the species man; and so forth. These people all get very fair play, even when ridiculed, and are brought to the test of sound common sense, and of that kind of wit which has been described in the Pall Mall Gazette as only sense sharpened till it shines.' The politics of the author are not easily defined. Like many men who are literary rather than political, he seem to have been Conservative on one side of his mind, and Liberal on the other. He laughed at the March of Intellect;' the glorification of the physical sciences; the worship of the multitude; and the novel schemes of education; of one class of his contemporaries. But he laughed also at the defences of rotten boroughs, and the high-flying Toryism of another class. He quizzed Brougham. He more than quizzed Southey, whom he somewhere calls a Priapus set up to guard the golden apples of corruption. In short, he was a

satirist, without being a partisan, and thought himself entitled to satirize whatever exaggerations he pleased, no matter in what directions the exaggerations tended. With regard to his place in the great schools of satire, just as we trace the pedigree of Churchill, through Dryden, to Juvenal, and that of Pope, in spite of grave differences, to Horace, so we call Peacock a child of Aristophanes. He had the gaiety; the dramatic freedom; the lively wit; the feeling for nature; the turn for song; all of which were possessed by

'The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,'

of course on a greater and more brilliant scale.

In the first novel of the series, Headlong Hall,' the scene lies in the château of a Welsh squire, at which philosophers of all kinds of views are assembled, the usual parson being this time a Reverend Doctor Gaster, whose name suggests fun, and who supplies it. Here is a fragment of breakfast-talk

"The anatomy of the human stomach," said Mr. Escot," and the formation of the teeth, clearly place man in the class of frugivorous animals."

666

Many anatomists," said Mr. Foster, "are of a different opinion, and agree in discerning

the characteristics of the carnivorous classes."

"I am no anatomist," said Mr. Jenkison, "and cannot decide where doctors disagree; in the meantime, I conclude that man is omnivorous, and on that conclusion I act."

"Your conclusion is truly orthodox," said the Reverend Doctor Gaster; "indeed the loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed diet; and the practice of the Church in all ages shows "

"That it never loses sight of the loaves and fishes," said Mr. Escot.

"It never loses sight of any point of sound doctrine," said the reverend doctor.'

The reverend gentleman gets into a curious but very natural after-dinner scrape, in the passage which we subjoin

"The Reverend Doctor Gaster seated himself in the corner of a sofa, near Miss Philomela Poppyseed. Miss Poppyseed detailed to him the plan of a very moral and aristocratical novel she was preparing for the press, and continued holding forth, with her eyes half shut, till a long-drawn nasal tone from the reverend divine compelled her suddenly to open them in all the indignation of surprise. The cessation of the hum of her voice awakened the reverend gentleman, who, lifting up first one

eyelid, then the other, articulated, or rather murmured, "Admirably planned indeed!

"I have not quite finished, sir," said Miss Philomela, bridling. "Will you have the goodness to inform me where I left off?” The doctor hummed a while, and at length answered: "I think you had just laid it down as a position, that a thousand a year is an indispensable ingredient in the passion of love, and that no man who is not so far gifted by nature can reasonably presume to feel that passion himself, or be correctly the object of it with a well-regulated female."

That, sir," said Miss Philomela, highly incensed, "is the fundamental principle which I lay down in the first chapter, and which the whole four volumes, of which I detailed to you the outline, are intended to set in a strong practical light."

"Bless me," said the doctor, "what a nap I must have had!

Headlong Hall' contains one or two songs such as Peacock liked to introduce into his book; and Thackeray, we happen to know, thought his songs among the best of the age. There is a pleasant jollity in

that which we select: :

"In his last binn SIR PETER lies,

Who knew not what it was to frown; Death took him mellow by surprise,

And in his cellar stopped him down. Through all our land we could not boast To rise and fill a bumper toast, A knight more gay, more prompt than he,

And pass it round with THREE TIMES

THREE.

'None better knew the feast to sway,

Or keep Mirth's boat in better trim; For Nature had but little clay

Like that of which she moulded him. The meanest guest that graced his board Was there the freest of the free, His bumper toast when PETER poured, And passed it round with THREE TIMES

THREE.

'He kept at true good-humour's mark,
The social flow of pleasure's tide;
He never made a brow look dark,

Nor caused a tear, but when he died.
No sorrow round his tomb should dwell:
For funeral song, and passing bell,
More pleased his gay old ghost would be,

To hear no sound but THREE TIMES
THREE.'

Nightmare Abbey,' first published in successor of 1818, was the immediate Headlong Hall.' The Abbey is the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esq., a gloomy gentleman subject to the blue-devils, whose only son and heir had been christened

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Scythrop,'' from the name of a maternal ancestor who had hanged himself one rainy day in a fit of tædium vitæ, and had been eulogized by a coroner's jury in the comprehensive phrase of felo de se; on which account Mr. Glowry held his memory in high honour, and made a punch-bowl of his skull.' At this cheerful seat various visitors regale themselves - Flosky, a kind of caricature of Coleridge; Mr. Cypress, a Byronic poet, and others; including a Mr. and Mrs. Hilary, who bring with them an orphan niece, a daughter of Mr. Glowry's young est sister, who had made a runaway lovematch with an Irish officer.' The history of the unlucky gentlewoman is given by Peacock in a single most characteristic paragraph. The lady's fortune,' we are told, disappeared in the first year; love, by a natural consequence, disappeared in the second; the Irishman himself, by a still more natural consequence, disappeared in the third.' With her orphan daughter, his cousin, Scythrop, Mr. Glowry's heir, falls in love. But his father thinks the young lady too volatile for the family gravity, as well as too poor; and wishes him to marry Miss Toobad, the daughter of a Manichæan millennarian who believes that the supreme dominion of the world was for wise purposes given over for a while to the Evil Principle; and that this precise period of time is the point of his plentitude of er. Scythrop contrives to fall in love with Miss Toobad, as well as with the other; and while he is unable to decide between them they both marry among his father's guests. This amusing position is the only thing like plot in the tale, the charm of which, as of all Peacock's stories, is not in the fable, but in the point and sense of the narrative and dialogue. There is an afterdinner conversation in Nightmare Abbey' so clever in itself, and so curious as a picture of the humours of fifty years ago, that barring a little abridgment here and

there- we shall transcribe it in full:

-

pow

Scythrop (filling). It is the only styptic for a bleeding heart.

"The Honourable Mr. Listless (filling). — It is the only trouble that is very well worth taking. dote to the great wrath of the devil. 'Mr. Toobad (filling). It is the only anti

Mr. Hilary (filling). — It is the only symbol of perfect life." The inscription, "Hic non bibitur" will suit nothing but a tombstone.

-

'Mr. Glowry. You will see many fine old ruins, Mr. Cypress, many reminiscences of the ancient world, which I hope was better worth living in than the modern; though for the other, and would not go twenty miles to myself I care not a straw more for one than see anything that either could show. Mr. Cypress.- It is something to seek, Mr. Glowry. The mind is restless, and must persist in seeking, though to find is to be disappointed. Do you feel no aspirations towards the countries of Socrates and Cicero ? No wish to wander among the venerable remains of the greatness that has passed for ever?

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Mr. Glowry.-Not a grain.

Scythrop. I should have no pleasure in visiting countries that are past all hope of reand it seems to me that an Englishman who, generation. There is great hope of our own; either by his station in society or his genius, or (as in your instance, Mr. Cypress) by both, has the power of essentially serving his country in its arduous struggle with its domestic enemies, yet forsakes his country, which is still so rich in hope, to dwell in others which are only fertile in the ruins of memory, does what none of those ancients, whose fragmentary memorials you venerate, would have done in similar cir

cumstances.

'Mr. Hilary. I am one of those who cannot see the good that is to result from all this mystifying and blue-devilling of society. The wisdom of antiquity is too forcible not to strike contrast it presents to the cheerful and solid any one who has the least knowledge of classical literature. To represent vice and misery as the necessary accompaniments of genius is as mischievous as it is false, and the feeling is as unclassical as the language in which it is usually expressed.

Mr. Toobad. It is our calamity. The devil has come among us, and has begun by taking possession of all the cleverest fellows.

'Mr. Cypress.-There is no worth or beauty but in the mind's idea. Love sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind. The sum of our social destiny is to inflict or endure.

'Mr. Hilary. - Rather to bear and forbear, Mr. Cypress, -a maxim which you perhaps despise.

Mr. Cypress.

Love is not an inhabitant of

lusive beauty, among flowers whose odours are agonies, and trees whose gums are poison.

Mr. Hilary. You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.

ress.

gether!'

The reader who does not relish the cheerful vigour, the clearness, the fine sparkling salt of passages like this, which is, after all, only an average specimen of Peacock's manner, must have spoiled his palate by indulging in mawkish twaddle of one kind and another, or damaged his appetite by neglecting to take regular exercise on the hills of Attica and the banks of the Tiber. Nightmare Abbey' was followed, in 1822, by Maid Marian' in which Peacock goes back to the Robin Hood days, and carries his wit into the feudal forests, but which is chiefly remarkable for the freshness and grace with which he touches on silvan scenery, a kind of scenery dear to him (as already hinted) from a boy. To Maid Marian' succeeded in the same year Crotchet Castle,' another story of his more usual type, but where a new class of the humours of the time were selected for pungent exposition and genial banter. One of his best scholarly parsons, Dr. Folliott, is in Crotchet Castle,' and says and eats many a good thing in the course of it; but we must not overload our pages with quotations. We must be content only to mention Melincourt,' one of the most daring of all his fictions, in which, with Aristophanic boldness, he has introduced a Sir Oran Haut-ton, who is nothing but a well-trained ape, into good society as a living character, and has even made him be elected to Parliament for a borough. Melincourt' re-appeared in a cheap form in

1856.

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collected. A new generation rose around him, to many of whom his name the name of one who had written novels when Bulwer and Disraeli were children was unknown. His vigorous and versatile mind employed itself in new directions. He planned vessels which weathered the Cape, as he had produced books which will weather the century; but so far was he from abandoning letters, that his genius had an Indian summer not a whit less full of life and colour than the summer of its prime. 'Gryll Grange,' published in Fraser some six or seven years ago, when Peacock was more than seventy years of age, is quite as fresh as any book of the Headlong Hall' series, and even more remarkable than the best of them, for ingenuity, liveliness of humour, general vigour of wit, and wide reading in literature. What is not less interesting about Gryll Grange' is its similarity in tone and character to the author's novels of half a century before. His favourite views are not altered, only strengthened and confirmed. His favourite types are there, the jovial accomplished squire, Mr. Gryll; the old-school parson, a bon vivant and classical scholar, Dr. Opimian; and Lord Curryfin represents the prevalent mania for lecturing, as Cypress and Flosky in Nightmare Abbey,' the melancholy and transcendentalism of a quite different world. There must have been a wonderful vitality about a man who lived to criticise the views, and laugh at the nonsense, of three generations; and who laughed as merrily at the third - that rising just now as he had done at the first. Touching the plot of Gryll Grange,' we have not much to say. However improbable, it is ingenious; and every page of the book contains some sagacious, or humorous, or thoughtful thing, expressed with classic neatness and point. Gryll Grange,' too, contains perhaps the very best verses that Peacock ever wrote verses so good, indeed, that we reproduce them inextenso for the reader's enjoyment: