Neither of these strictures applies to Peacock, who launches the subject for us in a pungent description of the good old days of Celtic antiquity:[1]
"Political science they had none. * * * Still they went
to work politically much as we do. The powerful took all they
could get from their subjects and neighbors; and called something
or other sacred and glorious when they wanted the people
to fight for them. They repressed disaffection by force, when
it showed itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom
of speech, when it was, like Hamlet's reading, 'words, words,
words.'"
In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment,
with its parody of Lord Canning's Defense of the
British Constitution, and the satire on the game laws, set
the pace for the subsequent thrusts at Toryism and the
country squires, particularly Meredith's, whom he naturally
influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public
is punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:[2]
"We shall make out a very good case; but you must not
forget to call the present public distress an awful dispensation;
a little pious cant goes a great way towards turning the thoughts
of men from the dangerous and Jacobinical propensity of looking
into moral and political causes for moral and political
effects."
It is in Melincourt also that the campaign of Mr. Oran
Hautton in the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball
rolling into election camps,—later pushed along by the
authors of Pelham, The Newcomes, Doctor Thome, Felix
Holt, Middlemarch, and Beauchamp's Career.
Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative, and furnishes some counter satire against
