on for three-quarters now] has
been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all
that has been talked on the subject of Education alone were thrown into
the other, I think the latter would preponderate.' Indeed it cannot be
said that after nearly five-and-thirty years, up to and including the
present moment, during which Competitive Examination has been a field of
battle, much has been added to Peacock's attack on it, or anything said
on the other side to weaken the cogency of that attack. No doubt he was
to some extent a prejudiced judge; for, though few people would at any
time of his youth have had less to fear from competitive examination,
his own fortune had been made by the opposite system, and the
competitive scheme must infallibly tend rather to exclude than to admit
persons like him. But a wise criticism does not ask cut bone in cases
of argument, it simply looks to see whether the advocacy is sound, not
whether the advocate has received or expects his fee. And Peacock's
advocacy is here not merely sound; it is, in so far as it goes,
inexpugnable. It is true there is a still more irrefragable rejoinder to
it which has kept competition safe hitherto, though for obvious reasons
it will very rarely be found openly expressed by the defenders of the
system; and that is, that, under the popular jealousy resulting from
wide or universal suffrage, there is no alternative but competitive
examination, or else the American system of alternating spoils to
the victors, which is demonstrably worse for the public, and not
demonstrably much better for private interests.

As for table-turning, and lectures, and the 'excess of hurrying about,'
and 'Siberian' dinners and so forth, they are certainly not dead.
Table-turning may have changed its name; the others have not even
adopted the well-known expedient of the alias, but appear just as they
were thirty years ago in the social and satiric dictionaries of to-day.

It would be odd if this comparative freshness and actuality of subject
did not make _Gryll Grange_ one of the lightest and brightest of
Peacock's novels; and I think it fully deserves that description. But
it would be doing it extremely scant justice to allow any one to suppose
that its attractions consist solely, or even mainly, in 'valuable
thoughts' and expressions of sense, satire, and scholarship (to combine
Wordsworth with Warrington). In lighter respects, in respects of form
and movement, a