Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/214

 Neither of these strictures applies to Peacock, who launches the subject for us in a pungent description of the good old days of Celtic antiquity:

"Political science they had none. * * * Still they went to work politically much as we do. The powerful took all they could get from their subjects and neighbors; and called something or other sacred and glorious when they wanted the people to fight for them. They repressed disaffection by force, when it showed itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom of speech, when it was, like Hamlet's reading, 'words, words, words.'"

In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment, with its parody of Lord Canning's Defense of the British Constitution, and the satire on the game laws, set the pace for the subsequent thrusts at Toryism and the country squires, particularly Meredith's, whom he naturally influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public is punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:

"We shall make out a very good case; but you must not forget to call the present public distress an awful dispensation; a little pious cant goes a great way towards turning the thoughts of men from the dangerous and Jacobinical propensity of looking into moral and political causes for moral and political effects."

It is in Melincourt also that the campaign of Mr. Oran Hautton in the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball rolling into election camps,—later pushed along by the authors of Pelham, The Newcomes, Doctor Thome, ''Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Beauchamp's Career''.

Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative, and furnishes some counter satire against