through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which
he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as
being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full
of monstrosities, strings them into an epic." And so forth;
Peacock going on to characterise, in further illustration of his
argument, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, and Campbell. He did not
refer to Shelley; and Shelley read his friend's whimsical attack on
poetry with all good humour, proceeding to reply to it with a
"Defence of Poetry," which would have appeared in the same journal,
if the journal had survived. In this novel of "Crotchet Castle"
there is the same good-humoured exaggeration in the treatment of
"our learned friend"--Lord Brougham--to whom and to whose labours
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge there are repeated allusions.
In one case Peacock associates the labours of "our learned friend"
for the general instruction of the masses with encouragement of
robbery (page 172), and in another with body-snatching, or, worse,-
-murder for dissection (page 99). "The Lord deliver me from the
learned friend!" says Dr. Folliott. Brougham's elevation to a
peerage in November, 1830, as Lord Brougham and Vaux, is referred
to on page 177, where he is called Sir Guy do Vaux. It is not to
be forgotten, in the reading, that this story was written in 1831,
the year before the passing of the Reform Bill. It ends with a
scene suggested by the agricultural riots of that time. In the
ninth chapter, again, there is a passage dealing with Sir Walter
Scott after the fashion of the criticisms in the "Four Ages of
Poetry." But this critical satire gave nobody pain. Always there
was a ground-work of good sense, and the broad sweep of the satire
was utterly unlike the nibbling censure of the men whose wit is
tainted with ill-humour. We may see also that the poet's nature
cannot be expelled. In this volume we should find the touch of a