These objections, put briefly, come to this, that the author has not yet acquired the knack of telling a story, and that he has not discarded the habit of inapposite dissertation. There is truth in this summary, sharp and blunt at once as it is, and there is probably no reader who will not sometimes put up a prayer for the excision, extinction, expulsion, and general extermination of Mr. Fax. But political economy had always been a favourite subject of Peacock’s French masters; it had acquired, through Malthus (of whom Mr. Fax has sometimes been thought to be a Peacockian portrait), considerable vogue in England; and we have seen it reappear in our own time as a loading or padding to novels. Mr. Forester’s anti-saccharine fervour was a real thing for many years after _Melincourt_ was published—though I have never heard whether the amiable anti-saccharists or their descendants have founded any association to weep for the ruin of the West India planters first, and the West India Islands afterwards. Two other kinds of purpose appear in the novel, both of them distinctly political. In _Headlong Hall_ the attack on the _Quarterly Review_ had been tolerably obvious, but it had kept, if not entirely, yet mainly free of personalities. The scenes at Cimmerian Lodge and Mainchance Villa, with Mr. Feathernest’s sojourn at Melincourt, substitute for this impersonality a directness of personal lampoon as to the taste of which there cannot be very much question, while as to the justice and accuracy of it there cannot be, and among rational people of both sides never has been, any but one opinion. Mr. Vamp (Gifford), Mr. Anyside Antijack (Canning), and Mr. Killthedead (believed to be Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty, and a well-known writer on naval subjects), were perhaps fair game, for the two last were public men—in other words, public targets—and Gifford had only himself to blame if, after playing all his life at the roughest and most vicious of bowls, he got some rubbers. But the animus, the injustice, and, above all, the ludicrous inaccuracy of the attacks on Coleridge (Mr. Mystic), Southey (Mr. Feathernest), and Wordsworth (Mr. Paperstamp), are still almost inconceivable. That there was a certain superficial justification for accusing them all, especially Coleridge and Southey, of rather remarkable changes of opinion, that Coleridge was apt to be a little transcendental, and so forth, may be granted. But the attempt to carry the satire on to their moral and personal conduct is not only unjustifiable in itself, but displays a quite ludicrous ignorance and recklessness. Coleridge, heaven knows, was open enough to satire; and if Peacock had known anything whatever about him, he might have made a rather terrible exposure. But ‘Mr. Mystic,’ with his elaborate establishment at Cimmerian Lodge, is so unlike the fugitive philosopher who seldom had where to lay his head except in other men’s houses, that even amusement is difficult. And when