_Crotchet Castle_, the last but one of the series, which was published two years after _Elphin_ and nearly thirty before _Gryll Grange_, has been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with the description already given of _Nightmare Abbey_ and of _Elphin_. For _Nightmare Abbey_ is chiefly farce, and _The Misfortunes of Elphin_ is chiefly sardonic persiflage. _Crotchet Castle_ is comedy of a high and varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer; and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain unmoneyed Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book, however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl, Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is, a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist, Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists, the fops, the doctrinaires, and the mediævalists of the party. The book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's admirable drinking-songs:-- If I drink water while this doth last, May I never again drink wine; For how can a man, in his life of a span, Do anything better than dine? We'll dine and drink, and say if we think That anything better can be; And when we have dined, wish all mankind May dine as well as we. And though a good wish will fill no dish, And brim no cup with sack, Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring To illumine our studious track. O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes The light of the flask shall shine; And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way To drench the world with wine.