has not observed in
them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between
abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew,
Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most
inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce
from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,"
while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn
by consuming "a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of
bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port" and singing cheerful
love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes down
the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping--half a
dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide--like a chamois
or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds a
skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he
annexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness,
there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a
lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.

[10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the
eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can
seldom exist without a "follower."

Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as
Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and
some in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty
solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:
but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the
history of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through a
magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite
unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature,
before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural,
"four-dimension" nature and proportion which assert the novelist's power
memorably:--if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like
Amory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it
came before _Tristram Shandy_) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric
Novel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had
revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.
Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably
had influence), and it would