the book, by the proceedings connected therewith.  But Mr. Midshipman Easy is flawless—­except for the amiable but surely excessive sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy pere quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser.  Than this book there is not a better novel of special “humour” in literature; as much may be said of the greater part of Peter Simple, of not a little in Jacob Faithful (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to Marryat), and Japhet in Search of a Father, and of something in almost all.  Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means Marryat’s only province.  Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the clubhauling of the Diomede in Peter Simple, and the two great fights of the Aurora with the elements and with the Russian frigate in Mr. Midshipman Easy, to be extraordinarily fine things:—­vivid, free from extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at all.  An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat’s methods and merits:  while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts to produce the fun, in which Defoe is lacking and he himself so fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail.  There are exceptions—­the Dominie business in Jacob Faithful is one—­but they are exceptions.  Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to the humour of simple charge or exaggeration.

The last name on our present list belongs to the class of “eccentric” novelists—­the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly improper sense so much as in its true one.  Peacock never plays the Jack-pudding like Sterne:  and his shrewd wit never permits him the sincere aberrations of Amory.  But his work is out of the ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing.  It belongs to the tradition—­if to any tradition at all—­of Lucian and the Lucianists—­especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony Hamilton.  It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally different.  Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one) and essentially a humorist.  In the progress of his books from Headlong Hall (1816) to Gryll Grange (1860)—­the last separated from the group to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were covered by that group itself—­he mellowed his tone, but altered his scheme very little.  Except in Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the