extends the distances from furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes.  In the same way he has to marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully wise, but who seldom live more than two years:  and has a large number of children about whom he says nothing, “because he has not observed in them anything worth speaking about.”  The courtships are varied between abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew, Babel, “Christian-deism,” and the binomial theorem.  In the most inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce from his wallet “ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,” while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn by consuming “a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port” and singing cheerful love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife.  He comes down the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping—­half a dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide—­like a chamois or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram.  Every now and then he finds a skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he annexes:  and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness, there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.

    [10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the
    eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can
    seldom exist without a “follower.”

Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and some in its, madness.  The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:  but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the history of the English novel.  Its descriptions, rendered through a magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature, before it.  In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural, “four-dimension” nature and proportion which assert the novelist’s power memorably:—­if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like Amory’s John Buncle.  Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it came before Tristram Shandy) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric Novel—­not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.  Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.