If this is not a person of whom we would like to know more, I know not what the romance of biography is.  Thomas Amory’s life must have been a streak of crimson on the grey surface of the eighteenth century.  It is really a misfortune that the red is almost all washed off.

No odder book than John Buncle was published in England throughout the long life of Amory.  Romances there were, like Gulliver’s Travels and Peter Wilkins, in which the incidents were much more incredible, but there was no supposition that these would be treated as real history.  The curious feature of John Buncle is that the story is told with the strictest attention to realism and detail, and yet is embroidered all over with the impossible.  There can be no doubt that Amory, who belonged to an older school, was affected by the form of the new novels which were the fashion in 1756.  He wished to be as particular as Mr. Richardson, as manly as Captain Fielding, as breezy and vigorous as Dr. Smollett, the three new writers who were all the talk of the town.  But there was a twist in his brain which made his pictures of real life appear like scenes looked at through flawed glass.

The memoirs of John Buncle take the form of an autobiography, and there has been much discussion as to how much is, and how much is not, the personal history of Amory.  I confess I cannot see why we should not suppose all of it to be invented, although it certainly is odd to relate anecdotes and impressions of Dr. Swift, a propos of nothing at all, unless they formed part of the author’s experience.  For one thing, the hero is represented as being born about thirteen years later than Amory was—­if, indeed, we possess the true date of our worthy’s birth.  Buncle goes to college and becomes an earnest Unitarian.  The incidents of his life are all intellectual, until one “glorious first of August,” when he sallies forth from college with his gun and dog, and after four hours’ walk discovers that he has lost his way.  He is in the midst of splendid mountain scenery—­which leads us to wonder at which English University he was studying—­and descends through woody ravines and cliffs that overhang torrents, till he suddenly comes in sight of a “little harmonic building that had every charm and proportion architecture could give it.”  Finding one of the garden doors open, and being very hungry, the adventurous Buncle strolls in, and finds himself in “a grotto or shell-house, in which a politeness of fancy had produced and blended the greatest beauties of nature and decoration.” (There are more grottoes in the pages of Amory than exist in the whole of the British Islands.) This shell-house opened into a library, and in the library a beauteous object was sitting and reading.  She was studying a Hebrew Bible, and making philological notes on a small desk.  She raised her eyes and approached the stranger, “to know who I wanted” (for Buncle’s style, though picturesque, is not always grammatically irreproachable.)