MELINCOURT [Illustration: [Logo] [Illustration: _Sir Oran Haut-ton._] MELINCOURT OR SIR ORAN HAUT-TON BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY =London= MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 1896 _All rights reserved_ INTRODUCTION _Melincourt_ is usually considered the least interesting of Peacock’s novels; and in the strictly comparative sense—that is to say that it is the least interesting of a group, every one of which has peculiar and exceptional interest—the statement is no doubt true. The defects of the book are very obvious, and exceedingly easy to account for. _Headlong Hall_ had been very popular; and it was only in the course of nature that the author should repeat his successful experiment. But _Headlong Hall_ had been by no means free from faults; and it certainly was not out of the course of nature that they should reappear in the new venture. In the very noteworthy introduction which the author wrote nearly forty years later, and which contains the promise of _Gryll Grange_ as supplement to complete the satire, it is not unimportant to observe that he pays no attention to anything but the satirical purport. A man of seventy, satiated with business and not specially hungering after popularity, was not perhaps very likely to discuss his own novels in detail, even to the extent to which Scott and other persons of irreproachable taste have discussed theirs in separate or collected editions. But it is not extravagant to take his silence as a kind of indication of his point of view. His practice, however, if not his expressed theory, testifies to a consciousness that he had made a mistake in the scale of this novel. _Nightmare Abbey_, the next, is only just a third of its length: no two of the next three, even if added together, come up to it; and though _Gryll Grange_ is not so very much shorter, _Gryll Grange_ contains the accumulated irony of a lifetime, and is not open to any of the objections to which _Melincourt_ is exposed.