itself up for a serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation.

The enigmas in this passage (where it is undisputed that "English P----"
is Peacock) have much exercised the commentators. That Miss Griffith,
after her marriage, while still remaining a Snowdonian antelope, should
also have been a flamingo, is odd enough; but this as well as the
"camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible
enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly
worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are
more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not
perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of
commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's
peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which
have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few
than to the many. Not only is Peacock peculiarly liable to the charge of
being too clever, but he uses his cleverness in a way peculiarly
bewildering to those who like to have "This is a horse" writ large under
the presentation of the animal. His "rascally comparative" fancy, and
the abundant stores of material with which his reading provided it, lead
him perpetually to widen "the wound," till it is not surprising that
"the knife" (the particular satirical or polemical point that he is
urging) gets "lost in it." This weakness, if it be one, has in its
different ways of operation all sorts of curious results. One is, that
his personal portraits are perhaps farther removed from faithful
representations of the originals than the personal sketches of any other
writer, even among the most deliberate misrepresenters. There is,
indeed, a droll topsy-turvy resemblance to Shelley throughout the
Scythrop of _Nightmare Abbey_, but there Peacock was hardly using the
knife at all. When he satirises persons, he goes so far away from their
real personalities that the libel ceases to be libellous. It is
difficult to say whether Mr. Mystic, Mr. Flosky, or Mr. Skionar is least
like Coleridge; and Southey, intensely sensitive as he was to criticism,
need not have lost his equanimity over Mr. Feathernest. A single point
suggested itself to Peacock, that point suggested another, and so on and
so on, till he was miles away from the start. The inconsistency of his
political views has been justly, if somewhat pla