Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/101

 unduly prolonged, covering about half the period of his literary activity; and its output is difficult to segregate on account of the ambiguous description of much of his early work. But from the large mass of sketches, essays, skits, stories, perhaps half a dozen may be selected as being fairly within the limits of satirico-romance.

Two of them, the Hoggarty Diamond and the ''Yellowplush Papers'', are on the border line, included here only because too exaggerated and irresponsible to be otherwise classed. The same might be said of Barry Lyndon, which is not far from being a real novel. Yet perhaps none of these are more "grotesque" than some phases of legitimate fiction. Much of their humor comes from the dramatic monologue device. Five are roughly definable as burlesques: three—Catherine, A Legend of the Rhine, and The Rose and the Ring, of types; the other two, Novels by Eminent Hands, and Rebecca and Rowena, of individuals; yet here again, classification is misleading, as these latter are versus the forms of certain productions rather than their authors.

Meredith's Farina is an interesting companion piece to Thackeray's Rhine Legend, both having a Teutonic and chivalric background, and one might perhaps find a closer parallel there than in the one chosen by Moffat, who traces "reminiscences of Peacock in the fantastic element which occasionally crops up," in Meredith, and points out that the idea underlying Farina and ''Maid Marian'' is "substantially the same—an attempt to reproduce with gentle satire, the medieval romance of sentiment and gay adventure." It is true, however, that A Legend of the Rhine differs from both these in its mocking parade of anachronisms and telescoped chronology. It was "many, many hundred thousand years ago" that