e
irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the
coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the
nomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "Lord
Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it
had been for _Lydia_, I should not have protested.

The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlitt
compared _The Life of John Buncle_ (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat
idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of
the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes
been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, Thomas
Amory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he
prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the _Memoirs of several Ladies_
(1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first
sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The author
represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal
enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the
best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a
"Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague
eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell district
which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland,
"Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district--which even
now, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain some
of the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago was
much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness in
parts--he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration which
perhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From
Malham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the
head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged scenery
enough, some of which is actually recognisable when "reduced" from
Amory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances from
furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and
exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has to
marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the
present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully
wise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number of
children about whom he says nothing, "because he