[76] _Autobiography_, 133. [77] Preface to _Oliver Twist_, xv. That Dickens was mistaken as to the real point of _Don Quixote_, does not impair his argument. Thackeray had the same motive, of course, in his ridicule of _Paul Clifford_ and the sentimental-picaresque; not because it was sentimental or picaresque, but because it was misleading. In that respect it was he who inherited the mantle of Cervantes, as did Fielding before him in his ridicule of Richardson. [78] “The vices that call for the scourge of satire, are those which pervade the whole frame of society, and which, under some specious pretense of private duty, or the sanction of custom and precedent, are almost permitted to assume the semblance of virtue.” _Melincourt_, 160. (And here it is the pretense that makes it vulnerable.) In the Introduction, _Maid Marian_ is described to Shelley as a “comic romance of the twelfth century, which I shall make the vehicle of much oblique satire on all the oppressions that are done under the sun.” He became, however, so carried away with the romance that he lost sight of the satire, except for brief glimpses. In the Preface to _Headlong Hall_ (1837 edition) he rounds up the current follies, under the name Pretense: “Perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march forever, _pari passu_, with the march of mechanics which some facetiously call the march of intellect. * * * The array of false pretensions, moral, political, and literary, is as imposing as ever; * * * and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practice legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude; following * * * a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process: beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent.” 46–7. His motto for _Crochet Castle_ is: “_De monde est plein de fous, et qui n’en veut pas voir,_ _Doit se tenir tout seul, et casser son miroir._” [79] “And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist in my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices--on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes.” _Autobiography_, speaking of _The Way We Live Now_. Of _Framley Parsonage_: “The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting; some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy.” _Autobiography_, 129. [80] _The Young Duke_, 173. [81] _Never Too Late to Mend_, 216. [82] _Vanity Fair_, I, 104. [83] Ibid., I, 106.