Doit se tenir tout seul, et casser son miroir.”
[79] “And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist in my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices—on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes.” Autobiography, speaking of The Way We Live Now.
Of Framley Parsonage: “The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting; some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy.” Autobiography, 129.
[80] The Young Duke, 173.
[81] Never Too Late to Mend, 216.
[82] Vanity Fair, I, 104.
[83] Ibid., I, 106.
Cf. his Preface to The Newcomes: “This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will wear peacocks’ feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks, in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves * * * exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking;” 7.
[84] Preface to Pickwick (1847 edition), xix.
Cf. his letter to Charles Knight: “My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else—the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time—and the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the real, useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life:” Letters, I, 363.