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- ingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard
him, esteem him—sometimes love him."
Trollope[1] agrees as to the lay-clerical office:
"I have always thought of myself as a preacher of sermons,
and my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and
agreeable to my audience."
Dickens[2] also claims the intent of speaking the truth
in love:
"Cervantes laughed Spain's chivalry away, by showing Spain
its impossible and wild absurdity. It was my attempt, in my
humble and far-distant sphere, to dim the false glitter surrounding
something which really did exist, by showing it in its unattractive
and repulsive truth."
The greatest unamimity is as to objects. Peacock[3]*
- ↑ Autobiography, 133.
- ↑ Preface to Oliver Twist, xv. That Dickens was mistaken as to the real point of Don Quixote, does not impair his argument. Thackeray had the same motive, of course, in his ridicule of Paul Clifford and the sentimental-picaresque; not because it was sentimental or picaresque, but because it was misleading. In that respect it was he who inherited the mantle of Cervantes, as did Fielding before him in his ridicule of Richardson.
- ↑ "The vices that call for the scourge of satire, are those which pervade the whole frame of society, and which, under some specious pretense of private duty, or the sanction of custom and precedent, are almost permitted to assume the semblance of virtue." Melincourt, 160. (And here it is the pretense that makes it vulnerable.) In the Introduction, Maid Marian is described to Shelley as a "comic romance of the twelfth century, which I shall make the vehicle of much oblique satire on all the oppressions that are done under the sun." He became, however, so carried away with the romance that he lost sight of the satire, except for brief glimpses. In the Preface to Headlong Hall (1837 edition) he rounds up the current follies, under the name Pretense: "Perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcenden-*
