we remember the style of living in which Wordsworth, even at his wealthiest, indulged, and his tastes in all matters of art, coarse and fine, the extensive dinner-party at Mainchance Villa and its ‘mighty claret-shed’ become a very poor jest. The ‘sooth bourd’ may be ‘nae bourd,’ but the bourd which is altogether and glaringly opposite to the truth is a good deal worse. Most inexcusable of the three attacks, however, is that on Southey, which, I am sorry to say, is renewed (as it were, _sotto voce_) by the allusions to ‘Mr. Sackbut’ in _Nightmare Abbey_. That Southey gave some provocation to the irregulars of the Whig party by his slightly pharisaic airs of virtue, and some handle not merely by his curious political history, but by his more voluminous than impeccable poetical work, is undeniable. But to represent him as a rascal, though it might be worthy of Byron, was not worthy of Peacock; and to represent him as selling his soul for the pittance of the laureateship was unpardonable. Southey, as Shelley himself and many others of Peacock’s friends could have told the author of _Melincourt_, ‘feathered his nest’ with nothing but books, worked like a navvy (only that the navvy works in bursts and Southey worked unceasingly), at the least paying kinds of literature, in order to procure that lining, and lived, though not sordidly, with the utmost simplicity. It would perhaps be less difficult to forgive this unfairness if the result were more amusing, but as it is Peacock is condemned by the laws of art no less than by those of ethics. He was quite infinitely more fortunate in his other political foray—the satire on rotten boroughs in the history of the Onevote election. The rotten-borough system may have had its advantages, but nobody ever denied that it lent itself admirably to satire; and I am rather inclined to fix on this as the first complete example of Peacock’s method of sarcastic exposure. Indeed, ‘Mr. Sarcastic’ himself, unless my imagination deceives me, comes nearer to Peacock’s own character than almost any other of his personages. And the whole thing, in a bravura style, is capital. It is indeed sad to notice that the constant legislative curtailments of the picturesque and pleasing in politics have quite recently done away with the last shred of actuality in the Onevote episode. For it was recorded, during the first Parish Council elections recently, that an actual Mr. Christopher Corporate was practically disfranchised, because, though he proposed his candidate, and might have voted for him, he was not allowed as a seconder, and no other existed.