indite, with "much humour," and "real comic gaiety." Theodore Hook is rather severely handled; "your Theodore Hook" is said to have "sold himself for the enjoyment of gold plate and white Hermitage." "He was inclined to swagger, I understand, among his equals. The plush had eaten into his very soul." "He satirised in a truly vulgar spirit." Mr. Hannay, in his notice of Swift, quotes applaudingly some one's mot à propos of Jeffrey's essay on the Dean—that if it proved Jeffrey was alive, it proved still more clearly that Swift was dead; and he thinks "it was just as well for Jeffrey that he was dead!"—adding, "Don't let us crow too much on the strength of it!" Theodore Hook was no Swift, but possibly it may be none the worse for Mr. Hannay that even "your Theodore Hook" is dead and makes no sign.
Hood is honourably "entreated," and it is truly said of him, whom we, too, set infinitely more store by than by the Hook and Maginn school, that there was a real spirit of chivalry in him; that while high-minded and aspiring he ever remained a homely, brotherly, unaffected man; and that with all his sense of fun and ridicule, and his abundant playfulness, he never loses his exquisite sense for the beautiful. Living satirists, too, are briefly indicated and characterised; Fonblanque, as a satiric reasoner; Thackeray, as a satiric painter; Dickens, as embodying his satire in a huge element of comic and grotesque fun, and human enjoyment of life; Landor, κατ᾽εξοχην "the classic," as darting beautiful lightning, when not more amiably disposed; Disraeli, as a satirist bitter and dignified, "who browsed in his youth on Byron and Junius, who affects Apollo when he sneers, and Pegasus when he kicks;" Aytoun, whose "jolly contempt has a good-fellowish air about it, and whose rod seems odorous of whisky-toddy;" and Douglas Jerrold, as endowed with "real satiric genius,—spontaneous, picturesque,—with the beauty and the deadliness of nightshade."
The lectures conclude with a hearty fling at the "simious satirist" and his tribe—a school of satirists devoid of natural reverence,[1] suspecting everything, sparing nothing. The whole finale deserves quotation; but it deserves more, and this desert better agrees with our limits,—to be read as an ungarbled sequel, in its original form.
- ↑ That such a school should take root and bear much fruit on English ground, forbid it Heaven! English literature of the satirical and humorous kind has been hitherto recognised as representative of a quite opposite tendency, by admiring and sympathising foreigners. Jean Paul, for example, says: "Salt is a very good condiment, but very bad food. Never do I feel more refreshed by serious passages than when they occur amidst comic ones; as the green spots amid the rocks and glaciers of Switzerland soothe the eye amid the glare and glitter of snow and ice. Hence it is that the humour of the English, which is engrafted on the stem of lofty seriousness, has grown so luxuriantly, and overtopped that of all other nations. A satire on everything is a satire on nothing ; it is mere absurdity. … Can there be a more mortally poisonous consumption and asphyxy of the mind than this decline and extinction of all reverence?"—Mrs. Austin's Translation.
