“And all the while the broad still moon stared down on them grim and cold, as if with a saturnine sneer at the whole humbug; and the silly birds about whom all this butchery went on, slept quietly over their heads, every one with his head under his wing. Oh! if the pheasants had but understanding, how they would split their sides with chuckling and crowing at the follies which civilized Christian men perpetrate for their precious sake!” That Lytton should gain in poise and subtlety in the forty-five years intervening between _Pelham_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_ is to be expected, although the progression is by no means a steady one. Some of his most absurd sarcastic moralizing is found in _My Novel_, about midway in time,--particularly on the March of Enlightenment, with a smart sketch of half a dozen typical Marchers; and on liberal notions generally. And in the youthful volume are some very good touches, as this concerning his country uncle:[180] “He was, as people justly observed, rather an odd man: built schools for peasants, forgave poachers, and diminished his farmers’ rents; indeed, on account of these and similar eccentricities, he was thought a fool by some, and a madman by others.” This pales perceptibly, however, by the side of Peacock’s firm and vivid treatment of the same subject, embodied in Squire Crochet:[181] “He could not become, like a true-born English squire, part and parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not find in game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser-pounding, footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country gentleman an ornament to the world, and a blessing to the poor; he could not find in these valuable and amiable occupations, and in a corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate with that of the great king Nebuchadnezzer, when he was turned out to grass; he could not find in this great variety of useful action, and vast field of comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his time that accorded with his Caledonian instinct.” This in turn is quite equaled by Kenelm’s coming-of-age speech, though his indictment of the genus squire is couched in unironical satire. Not that the youth was unacquainted with the uses of irony. At the age of nine he had had occasion to send a letter to a schoolmate, conveying his conviction of that lad’s lack of intelligence. He had heard his father remark that a certain neighbor was an ass, and that he was going to write and tell him so. He made inquiries into the matter of phrasing such information. He received the following reply,--by which he profited most effectively in his own correspondence:[182]