The characters in the first three and the sixth are a sort of stock company, who reappear in the different dramatis personæ. Shelley has been identified with Foster of Headlong Hall, Scythrop of Nightmare Abbey, and Forester of Melincourt, though this last might also be Lord Monboddo, as Peacock, like Spenser, had no objection to the economy of duplication. Southey plays the unenviable parts of Nightshade in Headlong Hall, Feathernest in Melincourt, and Sackbut in Crochet Castle. In the last story, however, he may be Mr. Rumblesack Shanstee, since Wordsworth is probably meant in Mr. Wilful Wontsee. The latter is also Mr. Paperstamp in Melincourt. Coleridge is another of triple incarnation, appearing as Mystic in Melincourt. Flosky in Nightmare Abbey, and Skionar in Crochet Castle. In this last volume Byron figures as Cypress, and is probably also the Honorable Mr. Listless of Nightmare Abbey. Either Gifford or Jeffrey may be intended in Gall, in Headlong Hall. In Melincourt, Canning is Mr. Anyside Antijack, and Malthus, Mr. Fax.
Of all these the most purely personal, in the sense that they are satires on the men as individuals and not as representatives of a philosophy or an organization, are the hits at Coleridge and Southey.[251] The former is allowed to speak for himself:[252]
“‘I divide my day,’ said Mr. Mystic, ‘on a new principle: I am always poetical at breakfast, moral at luncheon, metaphysical at dinner, and political at tea. Now you shall know my opinion of the hopes of the world. * * *
“Who art thou?—Mystery!—I hail thee! Who art thou?—Jargon!—I love thee! Who art thou?—Superstition!—I worship thee! Hail, transcendental Triad!’”
Later while his companions are concerned practically over the catastrophe of an explosion of gas in his room, he bewails it as—[253]
“* * * an infallible omen of evil—a type and symbol of an approaching period of public light—when the smoke of metaphysical mystery, and the vapours of ancient superstition, which he had done all that in him lay to consolidate in the spirit of man, would explode at the touch of analytical reason, leaving nothing but the plain common sense matter-of-fact of moral and political truth—a day that he earnestly hoped he might never live to see.”
Mr. Floskey is thus described:[254]
“He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done, and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done, * * *” etc.
And thus he describes his opinion of current literature:[255]
“This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that is not as old as Jeremy Taylor; and, entre nous, the best parts of my friends’ books were either written or suggested by myself.”