Plain Satire calls for sense in every line.”
Young: Universal Passion.
[116] In one of Lytton’s first volumes is an observation interesting as perhaps the germ from which the plan of The Coming Race was developed.
Vincent, the philosopher of the story, remarks. (Pelham, 57):
“There are few better satires on a civilized country than the observations of visitors less polished; while, on the contrary, the civilized traveller, in describing the manners of the American barbarians, instead of conveying ridicule upon the visited, points the sarcasm on the visitor; and Tacitus could not have thought of a finer or nobler satire on the Roman luxuries than that insinuated by his treatise on the German simplicity.”
[117] Mill: Disraeli, the Author, Orator, and Statesman, 20.
He adds,—“although we cannot claim for it the merit of that matchless production, still, regarding it as a work of a very young man, it is to our thinking one of infinite promise.”
[118] Perhaps pardon should be asked on behalf of the irresponsible Circumstance which allowed so large a preponderance in this matter to the sex notoriously romantic, flighty, ignorant of real life, and impatient of its prose and drudgery. As to the one man, Bryce remarks, in his Studies in Contemporary Biography, “But whoever does read Trollope in 1930 will gather from his pages better than from any others an impression of what everyday life was like in England in the ‘middle Victorian’ period.”
[119] Ernest Maltravers, 32. Cf. How It Strikes a Contemporary.
[120] These types may be summarized for convenience in a topical outline: