“But you can not learn too early this fact, that irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman is an ass, he does not say it point-blank--he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.” This principle is applied on a national scale in the discourse of the intruder among the Vrilya, whose situation resembles that of Gulliver eulogizing to the king of the Brobdingnagians the Institutions of England, except that Lytton does not blunt his irony by relapsing into plain terms, as Swift does in the “pernicious race of little odious vermin.” The visitor waxes eloquent about America:[183] “Naturally desiring to represent in the most favorable colors the world from which I came, I touched but slightly, though indulgently, on the antiquated and decaying institutions of Europe, in order to expatiate on the present grandeur and prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously sees its model and tremblingly foresees its doom. Selecting for an example of the social life of the United States that city in which progress advances at the fastest rate, I indulged in an animated description of the moral habits of New York. Mortified to see, by the faces of my listeners, that I did not make the favorable impression I had anticipated, I elevated my theme; dwelling on the excellence of democratic institutions, their promotion of tranquil happiness by the government of party, and the mode in which they diffused such happiness throughout the community by preferring, for the exercise of power and the acquisition of honors, the lowest citizens in point of property, education, and character.” This is the ironic version of Matthew Arnold’s polished dubiety about majorities in _Numbers_; and of the robustious satire of Dickens. If we feel that Lytton excels the latter in pithy conciseness and allusive point, we have to remember that he was at this time more than twice the age of Dickens when _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was written, and that in the intervening quarter century some improving changes had taken place in their common object of satire. Disraeli’s irony is less tangible and quotable. His favorite method is to hint at the implication in a burlesque comparison; as in the opening sentence of _The Young Duke_:[184] “George Augustus Frederick, Duke of Saint James, completed his twenty-first year, an event which created almost as great a sensation among the aristocracy of England as the Norman Conquest.” Later his toilette is described in terms of a campaign, concluding,[185] “He assumes the look, the air that befit the occasion: cordial, but dignified; sublime, but sweet. He descends like a deity from Olympus to a banquet of illustrious mortals.”