It might seem that a romanticism so prevalent and avowed would not be the best medium for satire, which is supposed to be realistic in the sense that it deals with the actual. But since satire is directed against persons rather than circumstances, it is in no danger so long as the romancing is confined to the situations, and the characters are kept to the plane of reality,--as is the case, with a few easily recognizable exceptions, in the Victorian novel. That the difficulty of truthfulness is one excuse for indulgence in the easier romantic method, is admitted by Eliot:[413] “The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin--the longer the claws and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real, unexaggerated lion.” But in Victorian fiction neither griffins nor lions are in much evidence. The total personnel is fairly well symbolized (with the addition of a few more of the nobler brutes than are admitted by Thackeray) in the Overture to _The Newcomes_, wherein the “farrago of old fables” pictures a crow, a frog, an ox, a wolf, a fox, an owl, and a few lambs, but only the skin of a lion,--and that serving as cloak for a donkey. The romantico-realistic solution, therefore, forms probably the most satisfactory base for the dissolving of the critical-humorous acid and the precipitation of satire. It secures a maximum of pungency with a minimum of flatness, and is perfectly safe to take. As satire ramifies on the critical side into pessimism, tragedy, idealism, and the cognate matters of romanticism and realism, so it extends on the humorous into the comic, the witty, and the philosophic amusement known as a sense of humor.