Page:Varia.djvu/158

and his ever popular toast in "The School for Scandal," which is not properly a drinking-song at all. Then there came a time when the spurious conviviality of Barry Cornwall passed for something fine and genuine, and when Thomas Haynes Bayly "gave to minstrelsy the attributes of intellect, and reclaimed even festive song from vulgarity." And at precisely this period, when a vapid elegance pervaded the ditties warbled forth in refined drawing-rooms, and when Moore alone, of all the popular song-writers, held the secret of true music in his heart, Thomas Love Peacock wrote for respectable and sentimental England five of the very best drinking-songs ever given to an ungrateful world. No thought of possible disapprobation vexed his soul's serenity. He lived in the nineteenth century, as completely uncontaminated by nineteenth-century ideals as though Robinson Crusoe's desert island had been his resting-place. The shafts of his good-tempered ridicule were leveled at all that his countrymen were striving to prove sacred and beneficial. His easy laugh rang out just when everybody was most strenuous in the cause of progress. His wit