THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. By J. B. Priestley. (" English Men
of Letters." Macmillan. 5s.)—Mr. Priestley finds Peacock, the efficient India House official and the perverse and whimsical amateur in literature, " a treacherous
subject for criticism." As a biographer, he is successful enough, and describes Peacock's life and personality at once succinctly and with charm. The sununary of his books is also pleasantly written. But when he conies to the critical part of his task Mr. Priestley is heavy and repetitive, taking too much space to stress what is really his only original argument —namely, that Peacock, whose satire has been too generally appreciated to the exclusion of the gentler underlying humour, was " a baffled idealist." His view of life was closely akin to Shelley's. Both men saw the real and ideal worlds in Sharp contrast. But, while Shelley thought that a few strokes would transform the real into the ideal, the satirist in Peacock had lost that belief, and, since for him the world was apparently past mending, the only thing to do was to laUgh at it.
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