By temperament Peacock and Butler were both solitary, pervaded by a gentle melancholy, and permeated with love of classic lore. But Peacock’s sadness could take the ironic Jonsonian turn. Quite appropriately did he choose “Your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit,” as the motto for _Nightmare Abbey_. Butler’s persiflage, however, covers a more real and permanent pessimism, perhaps because it is directed against the spectacle of the wilfully blind leading the born blind, rather than against a lot of “sentimentalists, chasers after novelty, bilious malcontents.”[89] As was natural, neither was acclaimed by the populace, and neither cared. Peacock had little concern for the British public, which might like him or not, as it pleased; and Butler was content to write for the coming generation, in whose appreciation he placed a not unjustified confidence. Both could afford to publish at their own expense and were willing to do so. But in spite of their apparent detachment from local affairs, and preoccupation with the past, perhaps indeed for that very reason, these two thoughtful scholars were able to observe their environment keenly and judge it shrewdly. It was the total environment that interested each one, his own _Zeitgeist_, of which neither approved. Peacock rebelled against the futile ferment and restless experimenting of the first half of the century; Butler protested against the torpid acquiescence and smug complacency of the second. These attitudes represent the chief contrast between them. Peacock was a calm soul, caught in a vortex. He could not be expected to like it. Butler was a speculative one, pent in a self-satisfied halcyon. He could not like that. What each would have been if exchanged in time with the other, it were idle to guess. But it was no irony of fate that made it the congenial mission of one to banter his age into calming down, and of the other to prick his into waking up. An additional difference, and the main one, is that Butler is the bigger man in every way more searching and earnest, more constructive, more versatile, more profound. An additional resemblance is that their fiction is so entirely in the romantic field[90] that they alone of all on this list will not come up for consideration when we reach the other. Peacock’s novels[91] form probably the most monomorphic little group to be found in literature. His seven fantasies have the strong family resemblance of the seven vestal maidens in _Gryll Grange_. Six of the Pleiades appeared in a compact series within a fifteen-year period; and the apparently lost sister joined the constellation thirty years later than the latest preceding one.