“had an amazing collection of the most rational philosophical ideas, and she delivered them in the most pleasing dress.”  She resided in a grotto within a romantic dale in Yorkshire, in a “little female republic” of one hundred souls, all of them “straight, clean, handsome girls.”  In this glen there is only one man, and he a fossil.  Miss Melmoth, who would discuss the paulo-post futurum of a Greek verb with the utmost care and politeness, and had studied “the Minerva of Sanctius and Hickes’ Northern Thesaurus,” was another nice young lady, though rather free in her manner with gentlemen.  But they all die, sacrificed to the insatiable fate of Buncle.

Here the reader may like to enjoy a sample of Buncle as a philosopher.  It is a characteristic passage: 

“Such was the soliloquy I spoke, as I gazed on the skeleton of John Orton; and just as I had ended, the boys brought in the wild turkey, which they had very ingeniously roasted, and with some of Mrs. Burcot’s fine ale and bread, I had an excellent supper.  The bones of the penitent Orton I removed to a hole I had ordered my lad to dig for them; the skull excepted, which I kept, and still keep on my table for a memento mori; and that I may never forget the good lesson which the percipient who once resided in it had given.  It is often the subject of my meditation.  When I am alone of an evening, in my closet, which is often my case, I have the skull of John Orton before me, and as I smoke a philosophic pipe, with my eyes fastened on it, I learn more from the solemn object than I could from the most philosophical and laboured speculations.  What a wild and hot head once—­how cold and still now; poor skull, I say:  and what was the end of all thy daring, frolics and gambols—­thy licentiousness and impiety—­a severe and bitter repentance.  In piety and goodness John Orton found at last that happiness the world could not give him.”

Hazlitt has said that “the soul of Rabelais passed into John Amory.”  His name was Thomas, not John, and there is very little that is Rabelaisian in his spirit.  One sees what Hazlitt meant—­the voluble and diffuse learning, the desultory thread of narration, the mixture of religion and animalism.  But the resemblance is very superficial, and the parallel too complimentary to Amory.  It is difficult to think of the soul of Rabelais in connection with a pedantic and uxorious Unitarian.  To lovers of odd books, John Buncle will always have a genuine attraction.  Its learning would have dazzled Dr. Primrose, and is put on in glittering spars and shells, like the ornaments of the many grottoes that it describes.  It is diversified by descriptions of natural scenery, which are often exceedingly felicitous and original, and it is quickened by the human warmth and flush of the love passages, which, with all their quaintness, are extremely human.  It is essentially a “healthy” book, as Charles Lamb, with such a startling result,