Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I | Page 3

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'insolent Greece or haughty Rome,' that passed current among
us--'Peter Wilkins,' the 'Adventures of the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle,'
the 'Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy,' and the like." But nobody loved the old
romance with such devotion as Leigh Hunt. He was never tired of
discoursing about its beauties, and he wrote with such thorough
appreciation of his subject that he left little or nothing for another to
add. "It is interesting," he writes in one place, "to fancy R. P., or 'Mr.
Robert Paltock of Clement's Inn,' a gentle lover of books, not
successful enough, perhaps, as a barrister to lead a public or profitable

life, but eking out a little employment or a bit of a patrimony with
literature congenial to him, and looking oftener to 'Purchase Pilgrims'
on his shelves than to 'Coke on Littleton.' We picture him to ourselves
with 'Robinson Crusoe' on one side of him and 'Gaudentio di Lucca' on
the other, hearing the pen go over his paper in one of those quiet rooms
in Clement's Inn that look out of its old-fashioned buildings into the
little garden with the dial in it held by the negro: one of the prettiest
corners in London, and extremely fit for a sequestered fancy that
cannot get any further. There he sits, the unknown, ingenious, and
amiable Mr. Robert Paltock, thinking of an imaginary beauty for want
of a better, and creating her for the delight of posterity, though his
contemporaries were to know little or nothing of her. We shall never go
through the place again without regarding him as its crowning
interest.... Now a sweeter creature [than Youwarkee] is not to be found
in books; and she does him immortal honour. She is all tenderness and
vivacity; all born good taste and blessed companionship. Her pleasure
consists but in his; she prevents all his wishes; has neither prudery nor
immodesty; sheds not a tear but from right feeling; is the good of his
home and the grace of his fancy. It has been well observed that the
author has not made his flying women in general light and airy
enough... And it may be said, on the other hand, that the kind of wing,
the graundee, or elastic drapery which opens and shuts at pleasure,
however ingeniously and even beautifully contrived, would necessitate
creatures whose modifications of humanity, bodily and mental, though
never so good after their kind, might have startled the inventor had he
been more of a naturalist; might have developed a being very different
from the feminine, sympathising, and lovely Youwarkee. Muscles and
nerves not human must have been associated with inhuman wants and
feelings; probably have necessitated talons and a beak! At best the
woman would have been wilder, more elvish, capricious, and
unaccountable. She would have ruffled her whalebones when angry;
been horribly intimate, perhaps, with birds' nests and fights with eagles;
and frightened Wilkins out of his wits with dashing betwixt rocks and
pulling the noses of seals and gulls. ("Book for a Corner," 1868, i. 68,
&c.) Could criticism be more delightful? But in the "London Journal,"
November 5, 1834, the genial essayist's fancy dallied even more
daintily with the theme: "A peacock with his plumage displayed, full of

'rainbows and starry eyes,' is a fine object, but think of a lovely woman
set in front of an ethereal shell and wafted about like a Venus.... We are
to picture to ourselves a nymph in a vest of the finest texture and most
delicate carnation. On a sudden this drapery parts in two and flies back,
stretched from head to foot like an oval fan or an umbrella; and the lady
is in front of it, preparing to sweep blushing away from us and 'winnow
the buxom air.'"
For many of us the conduct of life is becoming evermore a thing of
greater perplexity. It is wearisome to be rudely jostling one another for
the world's prizes, while myriads are toiling round us in an Egyptian
bondage unlit by one ray of sunshine from the cradle to the grave.
Some have attained to Lucretian heights of philosophy, whence they
look with indifference over the tossing world-wide sea of human
misery; but others are fain to avert their eyes, to clean forget for a
season the actual world and lose themselves in the mazes of romance.
In moments of despondency there is no greater relief to a fretted spirit
than to turn to the "Odyssey" or Mr. Payne's exquisite translation of the
"Arabian Nights." Great should be our gratitude to Mr. Morris for
teaching us in golden verse that "Love is Enough," and for spreading
wide the gates of his "Earthly Paradise." Lucian's "True History," that
carries us over unknown seas beyond the Atlantic bounds to enchanted
islands in the west,