Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/322

 *ness toward the idea of reform. Henry Little wades through and climbs over all sorts of official obstacles until "he had done, in sixty days, what a true inventor will do in twenty-four hours, whenever the various metallic ages shall be succeeded by the age of reason." A prison inspector is finally confronted with actual facts of a horrifying nature:

"How unreal and idle appeared now the twenty years gone in tape and circumlocution! Away went his life of shadows—his career of watery polysyllables meandering through the great desert into the Dead Sea."

But more subtle and vital than all these errors,—the error indeed at the root of them all,—is the failure of the State to utilize the fine material placed at its disposal, potentially if not actually, in the lives of noble and capable youth. No one before Lytton could have laid at the