arlier work. But since the wit is as bright as ever, though less
hard, it seems unreasonable to impute as a defect what, but for very
obvious reasons, would be admitted as an improvement.

Except Brougham, who still comes in for some severe language, no one of
Peacock's old favourite abominations undergoes personal chastisement.
On the contrary, indirect but pretty distinct apology is tendered to
Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge by appreciative citation of their
work. Even among the general victims, Scotchmen and political
economists have a still more direct olive-branch extended to them by
the introduction of the personage of Mr. MacBorrowdale: there is no more
blasphemy of Scott: and I do not at the present moment remember any very
distinct slaps at paper money. Peace had been made long ago with the
Church of England, through the powerful medium of Dr. Folliott; but it
is ratified and cemented anew here not merely by the presentation of
Dr. Opimian, but (in rather an odd fashion perhaps) by the trait of
Falconer's devotion to St. Catharine. So also, as the fair hand of
Lady Clarinda, despite some hard knocks administered to her father and
brother, had beckoned Peacock away from his cut-and-dried satire of
the aristocracy, so now Lord Curryfin exhibits a further stage of
reconciliation. In short, all those elements of society to which very
young men, not wanting either in brains or heart, often take crude and
fanciful objection, had by this time approved themselves (as they always
do, with the rarest exceptions, to les ames bien nees) at worst graceful
if unnecessary ornaments to life, at best valuable to the social fabric
as solid and all but indispensable buttresses of it.

In all these 'reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries,' however,
it is very important to observe that there is no mawkishness; and,
whatever may have been sometimes thought and said, there is no 'ratting*
in the real sense. As must be obvious to any attentive reader of the
novels, and as has been pointed out once or twice before in these
introductions, Peacock had at no time been anything like an enrolled,
much less a convinced, member of the Radical or any party. He may have
been a Republican in his youth, though for my part I should like more
trustworthy evidence for it than that of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a very
clever but a distinctly unscrupulous person. If he was--and it is not at
all improbable that he had the Republican measles, a v