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 at the possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a conditional promise of retrenchment:

"When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which he professed while he was out; when borough electors will not sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion; when learned divines can afford to have a conscience; when universities are not one hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest of the world; when young ladies speak as they think, and when those who shudder at a tale of the horror of slavery will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose of contributing all in their power to its extinction:—why then, Forester, I will lay down my barouche."

Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication of reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be looked for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. For it is not in the too small lump of the solitary specimen that the leaven can best work, nor yet in the too large mass of the whole human race. It is in the unit between these two extremes, the body politic or social or religious or educational, that it may best perform its fermenting ministrations.

Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novel-*