ordinarily conversant. With this Peacock, even in his professed
poetical work, has not very much to do; and in his novels, even in _Maid
Marian_, he hardly attempts it. The other is the mode of satirical
presentment of well-known and familiar things, and this is all his own.
Even his remotest subjects are near enough to be in a manner familiar,
and _Gryll Grange_, with a few insignificant changes of names and
current follies, might have been written yesterday. He is, therefore,
not likely for a long time to lose the freshness and point which, at any
rate for the ordinary reader, are required in satirical handlings of
ordinary life; while his purely literary merits, especially his grasp
of the perennial follies and characters of humanity, of the _ludicrum
humani generis_ which never varies much in substance under its
ever-varying dress, are such as to assure him life even after the
immediate peculiarities which he satirised have ceased to be anything
but history.

IX

WILSON

Among those judgments of his contemporaries which make a sort of Inferno
of the posthumous writings of Thomas Carlyle, that passed upon
"Christopher North" has always seemed to me the most interesting, and
perhaps on the whole the fairest. There is enough and to spare of
onesidedness in it, and of the harshness which comes from onesidedness.
But it is hardly at all sour, and, when allowance is made for the point
of view, by no means unjust. The whole is interesting from the literary
side, but as it fills two large pages it is much too long to quote. The
personal description, "the broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man
struck me: his flashing eye, copious dishevelled head of hair, and rapid
unconcerned progress like that of a plough through stubble," is
characteristically graphic, and far the best of the numerous pen
sketches of "the Professor." As for the criticism, the following is the
kernel passage of it:--

Wilson had much nobleness of heart and many traits of noble
genius, but the central tie-beam seemed wanting always; very
long ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable
contradictions: Toryism with sansculottism; Methodism of a sort
with total incredulity; a noble loyal and religious nature not
strong enough to vanquish the perverse element it is born into.
Hence a being all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest
volcanic tumults; rocks over-grown indeed with tropical
luxuriance o