Produced by David Widger
GRYLL GRANGE
By Thomas Love Peacock
[Illustration: Minuet de la Cour 009-177]
[Illustration: Titlepage]
GRYLL GRANGE
BY
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896
INTRODUCTION
_Gryll Grange_, the last and mellowest fruit from Peacock's tree, was,
like most mellow fruit, not matured hastily. In saying this I do not
refer to the long period--exactly a generation in the conventional
sense--which intervened between _Crotchet Castle_ of 1831 and this of
1861. For we know as a matter of fact, from the preface to the 1856
edition of _Melincourt_, that Peacock was planning _Gryll Grange_ at
a time considerably nearer to, but still some years from, its actual
publication.
There might perhaps have been room for fear lest such a proceeding, on
the part of a man of seventy-five who was living in retirement, should
result in an ill-digested mass of detail, tempered or rather distempered
by the grumbling of old age, and exhibiting the marks of failing powers.
No anticipation could have been more happily falsified. The advance
in good temper of _Gryll Grange_, even upon Crotchet Castle itself, is
denied by no one. The book, though long for its author, is not in the
least overloaded; and no signs of failure have ever been detected in it
except by those who upbraid the still further severance between the
line of Peacock's thought and the line of what is vulgarly accounted
'progress,' and who almost openly impute decay to powers no longer used
on their side but against them. The only plausible pretext for this
insinuation is that very advance in mildness and mellowness which has
been noted--that comparative absence of the sharper and cruder strokes
of the earlier work. But since the wit is as bright as ever, though less
hard, it seems unreasonable to impute as a defect what, but for very
obvious reasons, would be admitted as an improvement.
Except Brougham, who still comes in for some severe language, no one of
Peacock's old favourite abominations undergoes personal chastisement.
On the contrary, indirect but pretty distinct apology is tendered to
Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge by appreciative citation of their
work. Even among the general victims, Scotchmen and political
economists have a still more direct olive-branch extended to them by
the introduction of the personage of Mr. MacBorrowdale: there is no more
blasphemy of Scott: and I do not at the present moment remember any very
distinct slaps at paper money. Peace had been made long ago with the
Church of England, through the powerful medium of Dr. Folliott; but it
is ratified and cemented anew here not merely by the presentation of
Dr. Opimian, but (in rather an odd fashion perhaps) by the trait of
Falconer's devotion to St. Catharine. So also, as the fair hand of
Lady Clarinda, despite some hard knocks administered to her father and
brother, had beckoned Peacock away from his cut-and-dried satire of
the aristocracy, so now Lord Curryfin exhibits a further stage of
reconciliation. In short, all those elements of society to which very
young men, not wanting either in brains or heart, often take crude and
fanciful objection, had by this time approved themselves (as they always
do, with the rarest exceptions, to les âmes bien nées) at worst graceful
if unnecessary ornaments to life, at best valuable to the social fabric
as solid and all but indispensable buttresses of it.
In all these 'reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries,' however,
it is very important to observe that there is no mawkishness; and,
whatever may have been sometimes thought and said, there is no 'ratting*
in the real sense. As must be obvious to any attentive reader of the
novels, and as has been pointed out once or twice before in these
introductions, Peacock had at no time been anything like an enrolled,
much less a convinced, member of the Radical or any party. He may have
been a Republican in his youth, though for my part I should like more
trustworthy evidence for it than that of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a very
clever but a distinctly unscrupulous person. If he was--and it is not at
all improbable that he had the Republican measles, a very common disease
of youth, pretty early--he certainly had never been a democrat. Even his
earlier satire is double-edged; and, as must be constantly repeated and
remembered, it was always his taste and his endeavour to shoot folly
as it flew, to attack existent and not extinct forms of popular or
fashionable delusion. Such follies, whether in 1860 or since, have
certainly not as a rule been of the aristocratic, monarchical, or Tory
order generally.
He found plenty of these follies, however, in the other kind--the kind
which he had begun to satirise smartly in _Crotchet Castle_--and he
showed pretty decisively that his hand had not lost its cunning, nor his
sword its sharpness. The satire, though partly, is not mainly political;
and it is an interesting detail (though it only refreshes the memory of
those who knew the facts then or have studied them since) that barely
she years before a far more sweeping reform than that of 1832, a very
acute judge who disliked and resisted it spoke of 'another reform
lunacy' as 'not likely to arise in his time.' And these words, it
must be remembered, are put in the mouth of Mr. MacBorrowdale, who is
represented as merely middle-aged.
It is fortunate, however, for the interest of _Gryll Grange_ that
politics, in the strict sense, occupy so small a part of it; for of all
subjects they lose interest first to all but a very select number of
readers. The bulk of the satiric comment of the book is devoted either
to purely social matters, or to the debateable land between these and
politics proper. A little but not very much of this is obsolete or
obsolescent. American slavery is no more; and the 'Pantopragmatic
Society' (in official language the Social Science Congress) has ceased
to exist as a single recognised institution. But there is not much about
slavery here, and if pantopragmatics have lost their special Society
they flourish more than ever as a general and fashionable subject of
human attention. You shall not open a number of the _Times_ twice,
perhaps not once in a week, without finding columns of debate, harangue,
or letter-writing purely pantopragmatical.
Still more is this the case with another subject which has even more
attention, and on which what some think the central and golden sentence
of the book is laid down by Dr. Opimian in the often-quoted words, 'If
all the nonsense which in the last quarter of a century [it is appalling
to think that this quarter is getting on for three-quarters now] has
been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all
that has been talked on the subject of Education alone were thrown into
the other, I think the latter would preponderate.' Indeed it cannot be
said that after nearly five-and-thirty years, up to and including the
present moment, during which Competitive Examination has been a field of
battle, much has been added to Peacock's attack on it, or anything said
on the other side to weaken the cogency of that attack. No doubt he was
to some extent a prejudiced judge; for, though few people would at any
time of his youth have had less to fear from competitive examination,
his own fortune had been made by the opposite system, and the
competitive scheme must infallibly tend rather to exclude than to admit
persons like him. But a wise criticism does not ask cut bone in cases
of argument, it simply looks to see whether the advocacy is sound, not
whether the advocate has received or expects his fee. And Peacock's
advocacy is here not merely sound; it is, in so far as it goes,
inexpugnable. It is true there is a still more irrefragable rejoinder to
it which has kept competition safe hitherto, though for obvious reasons
it will very rarely be found openly expressed by the defenders of the
system; and that is, that, under the popular jealousy resulting from
wide or universal suffrage, there is no alternative but competitive
examination, or else the American system of alternating spoils to
the victors, which is demonstrably worse for the public, and not
demonstrably much better for private interests.
As for table-turning, and lectures, and the 'excess of hurrying about,'
and 'Siberian' dinners and so forth, they are certainly not dead.
Table-turning may have changed its name; the others have not even
adopted the well-known expedient of the alias, but appear just as they
were thirty years ago in the social and satiric dictionaries of to-day.
It would be odd if this comparative freshness and actuality of subject
did not make _Gryll Grange_ one of the lightest and brightest of
Peacock's novels; and I think it fully deserves that description. But
it would be doing it extremely scant justice to allow any one to suppose
that its attractions consist solely, or even mainly, in 'valuable
thoughts' and expressions of sense, satire, and scholarship (to combine
Wordsworth with Warrington). In lighter respects, in respects of form
and movement, and it is absolutely impossible that he should have been
an Evangelical.
We must not dismiss without some special mention the episode--though it
is not properly an episode, inasmuch as it has throughout an important
connection with the working of the story--of 'Aristophanes in London.'
This has sometimes been adversely criticised as not sufficiently
antique--which seems to overlook the obvious retort that if it had been
more so it could not by any possibility have been sufficiently modern.
Those who know something of Aristophanes and something of London may
doubt whether it could have established the nexus much better. I
have elsewhere pointed out the curious connection with Mansel's
Phrontisterion, which was considerably earlier in date, and with the
sentiments of which Peacock would have been in the heartiest agreement.
But it is extremely unlikely that he ever saw it. His antipathy to the
English universities appears to have been one of the most enduring of
his crazes, probably because it was always the most unreasonable; and
though there is no active renewal of hostilities in this novel (or none
of importance), it is noticeable there is also no direct or indirect
palinode as there is in most other cases. As for the play itself, it
seems to me very good. Miss Gryll must have looked delightful as
Circe (we get a more distinct description of her personality here than
anywhere else), Gryllus has an excellent standpoint, and the dialogue,
though unequal, is quite admirable at the best. Indeed there is a
Gilbertian tone about the whole piece which I should be rather more
surprised at being the first to note, so far as I know, if I were not
pretty well prepared to find that the study of the average dramatic
critic is not much in Peacock. The choric trochees (which by the way
is a tautology) are of the highest excellence, especially the piece
beginning--
'As before the pike will fly'
in which Coeur-de-Lion's discomfiture of the 'septemvirate of quacks' is
hymned; and the finale is quite Attic. I do not know whether the thing
has ever been attempted as an actual show. Though rather exacting in its
machinery, it ought to have been.
The novel is rather full of other verse, but except 'Love and Age'--so
often mentioned, but never to be mentioned enough for its strange and
admirable commixture of sense and sentiment, of knowledge of the heart
and knowledge of life--this is not of the first class for Peacock,
certainly not worthy to be ranked with the play. 'The Death of Philemon'
is indeed a beautiful piece in its first half; the second were better
'cut' 'The Dappled Palfrey,' a very charming _fabliau_ in the original,
chiefly suggests the superiority of _Lochinvar_ to which it is a sort of
counterpart and complement. 'The New Order of Chivalry' with a good deal
of truth has also a good deal of illiberality; and, amusing as it is,
is a relapse into Peacock's old vein of almost insolent personality.
Sir Moses Montefiore and Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy did not deserve, though
they might afford to despise, the sort of cheap rallying here applied to
them; and might have retaliated, not without point, on persons who
drew large salaries at the India House, with frequent additional
gratifications, and stood up for 'chivalry' in their leisure moments.
And 'The Legend of St Laura' is not first rate. But the Italian
translations make us wish for more of the same.
On the whole, however, though we may like some things more and some less
here, I cannot conceive the whole being otherwise than delightful to any
person of knowledge, sense, and taste. And as we close Peacock's novels
there is this interesting though rather melancholy thought that we
'close the book' in more senses than one. They have never been imitated
save afar off; and even the far-off imitations have not been very
satisfactory. The English Muse seems to have set, at the joining of the
old and new ages, this one person with the learning and tastes of the
ancestors, with the irreverent criticism of the moderns, to comment on
the transition; and, having fashioned him, to have broken the mould.
George Saintsbury.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
Misnomers
CHAPTER II
The Squire and his Niece
CHAPTER III
The Duke's Folly
CHAPTER IV
The Forest--A Soliloquy on Hair
CHAPTER V.
The Seven Sisters
CHAPTER VI
The Rustic Lover
CHAPTER VII
The Vicar and his Wife--Families of Love:--
The Newspaper
CHAPTER VIII
Pantopragmatics
CHAPTER IX
Saint Catharine
CHAPTER X
The Thunderstorm
CHAPTER XI
Electrical Science--The Death of Philemon
CHAPTER XII
The Forest Dell--The Power of Love--The Lottery
of Marriage
CHAPTER XIII
Lord Curryfin--Siberian Dinners--Social Monotony
CHAPTER XIV
Music and Painting--Jack of Dover
CHAPTER XV
Expression in Music--The Dappled Palfrey--Love
and Age--Competitive Examination
CHAPTER XVI
Miss Niphet--The Theatre--The Lake--Divided Attraction
--Infallible Safety
CHAPTER XVII
Horse-Taming--Love in Dilemma--Injunctions--Sonorous Vases
CHAPTER XVIII
Lectures--The Power of Public Opinion--A New
Order of Chivalry
CHAPTER XIX
A Symposium--Transatlantic Tendencies
--After-Dinner Lectures--Education
CHAPTER XX
Algernon and Morgana--Opportunity and Repentance
--The Forest in Winter
CHAPTER XXI
Skating--Pas de deux on the Ice--Congeniality
--Flints among Bones
CHAPTER XXII
The Seven against Thebes--A Soliloquy on Christmas
CHAPTER XXIII
The two Quadrilles--Pope's Ombre--Poetical Truth to
Nature--Cleopatra
CHAPTER XXIV
Progress of Sympathy--Love's Injunctions--Orlando
Innamorato
CHAPTER XXV
Harry and Dorothy
CHAPTER XXVI
Doubts and Questions
CHAPTER XXVII
Love in Memory
CHAPTER XXVIII
Aristophanes in London
CHAPTER XXIX
The Bald Venus--Inez de Castro--The Unity of Love
CHAPTER XXX
A Captive Knight--Richard and Alice
CHAPTER XXXI
A Twelfth-Night Ball--Pantopragmatic Cookery
--Modern Vandalism--A Bowl of Punch
CHAPTER XXXII
Hopes and Fears--Compensations in Life--Athenian
Comedy--Madeira and Music--Confidences
CHAPTER XXXIII
The Conquest of Thebes
CHAPTER XXXIV
Christmas Tales--Classical Tales of Wonder--The
Host's Ghost--A Tale of a Shadow--A Tale of
a Bogle--The Legend of St. Laura
CHAPTER XXXV
Rejected Suitors--Conclusion
GRYLL GRANGE
Opinion governs all mankind,
Like the blind leading of the blind:--
And like the world, men's jobbemoles
Turn round upon their ears the poles,
And what they're confidently told
By no sense else can be controll'd.
In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were
still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been
acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and
purposes never to do so.
The mottoes are sometimes specially apposite to the chapters to which
they are prefixed; but more frequently to the general scope, or, to
borrow a musical term, the _motivo_ of the _operetta_.
CHAPTER I
MISNOMERS
Ego sic semper et ubique vixi, ut ultimam quamque lucem,
taraquam non redituram, consumerem.--Petronius Arbiter.
Always and everywhere I have so lived, that I might consume
the passing light as if it were not to return.
'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, dining with his
friend Squire Gryll; 'a curiously complicated misnomer. We have an
excellent old vegetable, the artichoke, of which we eat the head; we
have another of subsequent introduction, of which we eat the root, and
which we also call artichoke, because it resembles the first in flavour,
although, _me judice_, a very inferior affair. This last is a species of
the helianthus, or sunflower genus of the _Syngenesia frustranea_ class
of plants. It is therefore a girasol, or turn-to-the-sun. From this
girasol we have made Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem artichoke we make
Palestine soup.'
_Mr. Gryll._ A very good thing, doctor.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ A very good thing; but a palpable misnomer.
_Mr. Gryll._ I am afraid we live in a world of misnomers, and of a worse
kind than this. In my little experience I have found that a gang of
swindling bankers is a respectable old firm; that men who sell their
votes to the highest bidder, and want only 'the protection of the
ballot' to sell the promise of them to both parties, are a free and
independent constituency; that a man who successively betrays everybody
that trusts him, and abandons every principle he ever professed, is a
great statesman, and a Conservative, forsooth, _a nil conservando_; that
schemes for breeding pestilence are sanitary improvements; that the test
of intellectual capacity is in swallow, and not in digestion; that the
art of teaching everything, except what will be of use to the recipient,
is national education; and that a change for the worse is reform. Look
across the Atlantic. A Sympathiser would seem to imply a certain degree
of benevolent feeling. Nothing of the kind. It signifies a ready-made
accomplice in any species of political villainy. A Know-Nothing would
seem to imply a liberal self-diffidence--on the scriptural principle
that the beginning of knowledge is to know that thou art ignorant.
No such thing. It implies furious political dogmatism, enforced by
bludgeons and revolvers. A Locofoco is the only intelligible term:
a fellow that would set any place on fire to roast his own eggs. A
Filibuster is a pirate under national colours; but I suppose the word in
its origin implies something virtuous: perhaps a friend of humanity.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ More likely a friend of roaring-(Greek
phrase)--in the sense in which roaring is used by our old dramatists;
for which see Middleton's _Roaring Girl_, and the commentators thereon.
_Mr. Gryll._ While we are on the subject of misnomers, what say you to
the wisdom of Parliament?
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Why, sir, I do not call that a misnomer. The
term wisdom is used in a parliamentary sense. The wisdom of Parliament
is a wisdom _sui generis_. It is not like any other wisdom. It is not
the wisdom of Socrates, nor the wisdom of Solomon. It is the wisdom of
Parliament. It is not easily analysed or defined; but it is very easily
understood. It has achieved wonderful things by itself, and still more
when Science has come to its aid. Between them they have poisoned the
Thames, and killed the fish in the river. A little further development
of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air,
and kill the dwellers on the banks. It is pleasant that the precious
effluvium has been brought so efficiently under the Wisdom's own wise
nose. Thereat the nose, like Trinculo's, has been in great indignation.
The Wisdom has ordered the Science to do something. The Wisdom does
not know what, nor the Science either. But the Wisdom has empowered the
Science to spend some millions of money; and this, no doubt, the Science
will do. When the money has been spent, it will be found that the
something has been worse than nothing. The Science will want more money
to do some other something, and the Wisdom will grant it. _Redit labor
actus in orbem_.{1} But you have got on moral and political ground.
My remark was merely on a perversion of words, of which we have an
inexhaustible catalogue.
__Mr. Gryll.__ Whatever ground we take, doctor, there is one point
common to most of these cases: the word presents an idea which does not
belong to the subject, critically considered. Palestine soup is not
more remote from the true Jerusalem, than many an honourable friend from
public honesty and honour. However, doctor, what say you to a glass of
old Madeira, which I really believe is what it is called?
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ _In vino Veritas_. I accept with pleasure.
_Miss Gryll._ You and my uncle, doctor, get up a discussion on
everything that presents itself; dealing with your theme like a series
of variations in music. You have run half round the world _à propos_ of
the soup.{1} What say you to the fish?
1 The labour returns, compelled into a circle.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Premising that this is a remarkably fine slice
of salmon, there is much to be said about fish: but not in the way of
misnomers. Their names are single and simple. Perch, sole, cod, eel,
carp, char, skate, tench, trout, brill, bream, pike, and many others,
plain monosyllables: salmon, dory, turbot, gudgeon, lobster, whitebait,
grayling, haddock, mullet, herring, oyster, sturgeon, flounder, turtle,
plain dissyllables: only two trisyllables worth naming, anchovy and
mackerel; unless any one should be disposed to stand up for halibut,
which, for my part, I have excommunicated.
_Mr. Gryll._ I agree with you on that point; but I think you have named
one or two that might as well keep it company.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I do not think I have named a single
unpresentable fish.
_Mr. Gryll._ Bream, doctor: there is not much to be said for bream.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ On the contrary, sir, I think there is much
to be said for him. In the first place, there is the authority of
the monastic brotherhoods, who are universally admitted to have been
connoisseurs in fish, and in the mode of preparing it; and you will
find bream pie set down as a prominent item of luxurious living in the
indictments prepared against them at the dissolution of the monasteries.
The work of destruction was rather too rapid, and I fear the receipt
is lost. But he can still be served up as an excellent stew, provided
always that he is full-grown, and has swum all his life in clear running
water. I call everything fish that seas, lakes, and rivers furnish to
cookery; though, scientifically, a turtle is a reptile, and a lobster an
insect. Fish, Miss Gryll--I could discourse to you on fish by the hour:
but for the present I will forbear: as Lord Curryfin is coming down to
Thornback Bay, to lecture the fishermen on fish and fisheries, and to
astonish them all with the science of their art You will, no doubt, be
curious to hear him. There will be some reserved seats.
_Miss Gryll._ I shall be very curious to hear him, indeed. I have never
heard a lecturing lord. The fancy of lords and gentlemen to lecture
everybody on everything, everywhere, seems to me something very comical;
but perhaps it is something very serious, gracious in the lecturer,
and instructive to the audience. I shall be glad to be cured of my
unbecoming propensity to laugh whenever I hear of a lecturing lord.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I hope, Miss Gryll, you will not laugh at
Lord Curryfin: for you may be assured nothing will be farther from his
lordship's intention than to say anything in the slightest degree droll.
_Mr. Gryll._ Doctor Johnson was astonished at the mania for lectures,
even in his day, when there were no lecturing lords. He thought little
was to be learned from lectures, unless where, as in chemistry, the
subject required illustration by experiment. Now, if your lord is going
to exhibit experiments in the art of cooking fish, with specimens in
sufficient number for all his audience to taste, I have no doubt his
lecture will be well attended, and a repetition earnestly desired.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I am afraid the lecture will not have the aid
of such pleasant adventitious attractions. It will be a pure scientific
exposition, carefully classified, under the several divisions and
subdivisions of Ichthyology, Entomology, Herpetology, and Conchology.
But I agree with Doctor Johnson, that little is to be learned from
lectures. For the most part those who do not already understand the
subject will not understand the lecture, and those who do will learn
nothing from it. The latter will hear many things they would like to
contradict, which the _bienséance_ of the lecture-room does not allow.
I do not comprehend how people can find amusement in lectures. I should
much prefer a _tenson_ of the twelfth century, when two or three masters
of the _Gai Saber_ discussed questions of love and chivalry.
_Miss Gryll._ I am afraid, doctor, our age is too prosy for that sort
of thing. We have neither wit enough, nor poetry enough, to furnish the
disputants. I can conceive a state of society in which such _tensons_
would form a pleasant winter evening amusement: but that state of
society is not ours.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Well, Miss Gryll, I should like, some winter
evening, to challenge you to a _tenson_, and your uncle should be
umpire. I think you have wit enough by nature, and I have poetry enough
by memory, to supply a fair portion of the requisite materials, without
assuming an absolute mastery of the _Gai Saber_.
_Miss Gryll._ I shall accept the challenge, doctor. The wit on one side
will, I am afraid, be very shortcoming; but the poetry on the other will
no doubt be abundant.
_Mr. Gryll._ Suppose, doctor, you were to get up a _tenson_ a little
more relative to our own wise days. Spirit-rapping, for example, is a
fine field. _Nec pueri credunt... Sed tu vera puta_.{1} You might
go beyond the limits of a _tenson_. There is ample scope for an
Aristophanic comedy. In the contest between the Just and the Unjust
in the _Clouds_, and in other scenes of Aristophanes, you have ancient
specimens of something very like _tensons_, except that love has not
much share in them. Let us for a moment suppose this same spirit-rapping
to be true--dramatically so, at least. Let us fit up a stage for the
purpose: make the invoked spirits visible as well as audible: and
calling before us some of the illustrious of former days, ask them
what they think of us and our doings? Of our astounding progress of
intellect? Our march of mind? Our higher tone of morality? Our vast
diffusion of education? Our art of choosing the most unfit man by
competitive examination?
1 Not even boys believe it: but suppose it to be true.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ You had better not bring on many of them at
once, nor ask many similar questions, or the chorus of ghostly laughter
will be overwhelming. I imagine the answer would be something like
Hamlets: 'You yourselves, sirs, shall be as wise as we were, if, like
crabs, you could go backward.' It is thought something wonderful that
uneducated persons should believe in witchcraft in the nineteenth
century: as if educated persons did not believe in grosser follies:
such as this same spirit-rapping, unknown tongues, clairvoyance,
table-turning, and all sorts of fanatical impositions, having for the
present their climax in Mormonism. Herein all times are alike. There
is nothing too monstrous for human credulity. I like the notion of the
Aristophanic comedy. But it would require a numerous company, especially
as the chorus is indispensable. The _tenson_ may be carried on by two.
_Mr. Gryll._ I do not see why we should not have both.
_Miss Gryll._ Oh pray, doctor! let us have the comedy. We hope to have
a houseful at Christmas, and I think we may get it up well, chorus and
all. I should so like to hear what my great ancestor, Gryllus, thinks
of us: and Homer, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and Richard the First, and
Oliver Cromwell.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ A very good _dramatis personae_. With these,
and the help of one or two Athenians and Romans, we may arrive at a
tolerable judgment on our own immeasurable superiority to everything
that has gone before us.
Before we proceed further, we will give some account of our
interlocutors.