The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gryll Grange, by Thomas Love Peacock

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Title: Gryll Grange

Author: Thomas Love Peacock

Commentator: George Saintsbury

Illustrator: F. H. Townsend

Release Date: May 17, 2007 [EBook #21514]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GRYLL GRANGE ***

Produced by David Widger

GRYLL GRANGE

By Thomas Love Peacock

[Illustration: Minuet de la Cour 009-177]

[Illustration: Titlepage]

GRYLL GRANGE

BY

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY

London

MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.

1896

INTRODUCTION

_Gryll Grange_, the last and mellowest fruit from Peacock's tree, was,
like most mellow fruit, not matured hastily. In saying this I do not
refer to the long period--exactly a generation in the conventional
sense--which intervened between _Crotchet Castle_ of 1831 and this of
1861. For we know as a matter of fact, from the preface to the 1856
edition of _Melincourt_, that Peacock was planning _Gryll Grange_ at
a time considerably nearer to, but still some years from, its actual
publication.

There might perhaps have been room for fear lest such a proceeding, on
the part of a man of seventy-five who was living in retirement, should
result in an ill-digested mass of detail, tempered or rather distempered
by the grumbling of old age, and exhibiting the marks of failing powers.
No anticipation could have been more happily falsified. The advance
in good temper of _Gryll Grange_, even upon Crotchet Castle itself, is
denied by no one. The book, though long for its author, is not in the
least overloaded; and no signs of failure have ever been detected in it
except by those who upbraid the still further severance between the
line of Peacock's thought and the line of what is vulgarly accounted
'progress,' and who almost openly impute decay to powers no longer used
on their side but against them. The only plausible pretext for this
insinuation is that very advance in mildness and mellowness which has
been noted--that comparative absence of the sharper and cruder strokes
of the e