same. Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt and Crotchet Castle (1831), as well as Gryll Grange itself, all have the uniform, though by no means monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and consisting of a number of “originals,” with one or more common-sense but by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast.  It is in the selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock’s principal distinctions lies.  In his earlier books, and in accordance with the manners of the time, there is a good deal of “high jinks”—­less later.  In all, there is also a good deal of personal and literary satire, which tones and mellows as it proceeds.  At first Peacock is extremely unjust to the Lake poets—­so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly amusing—­to the two universities (of which it so happened that he was not a member), to the Tory party generally, to clergymen, to other things and persons.  In Crotchet Castle the progress of Reform was already beginning to produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him, and in Gryll Grange, though the manners and cast are surprisingly modern, the whole tone is conservative—­with a small if not even with a large C—­for the most prominent and well treated character is a Churchman of the best academic Tory type.

It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that Peacock’s charm consists, so much as in the intensely literary, but not in the least pedantic, tone with which he suffuses his books, the piquant but not in the least affected turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the peculiar quality of his irony (most quintessenced in The Misfortunes of Elphin, which is different in scheme from the rest, but omnipresent), and the crisp presentation of individual scene, incident, and character of a kind.  Story, in the general sense, there is none, or next to none—­the personages meet, go through a certain number of dinners (Peacock is great at eating and drinking), diversions, and difficulties, marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part.  Yet such things as the character of Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey (a half fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, who was Peacock’s intimate friend), or of Dr. Folliott (a genial parson) in Crotchet Castle—­as the brilliant picture of the breaking of the dyke in Elphin, or the comic one of the rotten-borough election in Melincourt—­are among the triumphs of the English novel.  And they are present by dozens and scores:  while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of inset verse—­sometimes serious, more often light—­of which Peacock, again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of prose.