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The Life of John Buncle, Esquire

Half-Forgotten Books

Edited by E. A. Baker, M.A.

With a Special Introduction to each Volume

Tom Bullkley of Lissington. By R. MOUNTENey Jephson. Whitefriars; or, the Days of Charles II.

ROBINSON.

The Mysteries of Udolpho. By ANN RADCliffe.
Caleb Williams. By WILLIAM GODWIN.

By EMMA

Sam Slick the Clockmaker. By JUDGE HALIBURTON.
Memoirs of Grimaldi the Clown.

By CHARLES DICKENS.

With Cruikshank's Illustrations, and Introduction by Percy Fitzgerald.

Black Sheep. By EDMUND YATES.

Guy Livingstone. By G. A. LAWRENCE.

Old London Bridge. By G. H. RODWELL.

The Camp of Refuge. By CHARLES MACFARLANE.

Reading Abbey. By CHARLES MACFARLANE.
Adventures of David Simple. By SARAH FIELDING.
Willy Reilly. By W. CARLETON.

The Hour and the Man. By HARRIET MARTINEAU.

The Pottleton Legacy. By ALBERT SMITH.

The Fool of Quality. By HENRY BROOKE.

The Cruise of "The Midge." By MICHAEL SCOTT.

The Nightside of Nature. By Mrs. CROWE.

THE

LIFE AND OPINIONS OF

JOHN BUNCLE
ESQUIRE

BY

THOMAS AMORY

With an Introduction by
ERNEST A. BAKER, M.A.

LONDON:

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED

NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & Co.

1904

PR3315
A4546
1904

INTRODUCTION

THE History of John Buncle has never been a popular book. It is hardly possible to imagine a period whose standard of taste and culture would render it popular. Yet it is safe to predict that it will always, as in the past, be an object of interest to the connoisseur, the explorer of curious by-paths of literature, and to all who have a liking for the eccentricities of human nature, when conjoined with strength and shrewdness, and with candour of expression. Thrice during the last century was the book disinterred from the obscurity that covered it, and on each occasion by a critic distinguished by this taste for originality. Charles Lamb, in The Two Races of Men, hits off the book with delightful humour when he says, "In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with eyes closed,' mourns his ravished mate." Hazlitt's enthusiasm led him, ill advisedly, to compare the author with a genius of a far superior order :

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"The soul of Francis Rabelais passed into John (sic) Amory, the author of The Life and Adventures of John Buncle. Both were physicians, and enemies of too much gravity. Their business was to enjoy life. Rabelais indulges his spirit of sensuality in wine, in dried neats'-tongues, in Bologna sausages, in botargos. John Buncle shows the same symptoms of inordinate satisfaction in tea and bread-and-butter. While Rabelais roared with Friar John and the monks, John Buncle gossiped with the ladies, and with equal and uncontrolled gaiety. These two authors possessed all the insolence of health, so that their works give a fillip to the constitution; but they carried off the exuberance of their natural spirits in different ways. The title of one of Rabelais' chapters (and the contents answer to the title) is, 'How they chirped over their cups.' The title of a corresponding chapter in John Buncle would run thus: The author is invited to spend the evening with the divine Miss Hawkins, and goes accordingly; with the delightful conversation that ensued.' The essay is so well known and so sententious that it has probably led many a man to take its judgments on trust, and not trouble to peruse the book for himself. Leigh Hunt, on the contrary, in that charming literary vade mecum of his, A Book for a Corner, entices one to get the book and read it, or rather to roam about in its leisurely and discursive pages. But whoever has been so tempted hitherto must have met with an initial difficulty, the extreme scarcity of the work. Amory published the first volume in 1756, along with a complete edition in four volumes, 12m0. Another edition appeared in three volumes in 1825, since which date the chances of coming across the book in any form have steadily grown more remote.

What is the peculiar attraction of John Buncle? That a book is merely a literary curiosity, or that it contains excellent passages interspersed amid a huge extent of tedious prosing, is certainly not the thing to secure the interest of Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt. What fascinates in the book is the vigour and the frankness with which a most exceptional, yet, in a way, a most representative kind of man reveals the whole of his character. For John Buncle is an eccentric only in the sense that he carries very common traits of char. acter to a strange excess. In his love of good living, his sensuality combined with a pharisaic animus against vice, in that blind egotism and portentous arrogance, one might perceive the exaggeration of certain national qualities, with which the author, who was in the first case anonymous, shows his sympathy by exalting them to the degree of absurdity. John Bull, at least one side of him, was caricatured, unintentionally, in John Buncle. And the sectarian spirit that is so deeply ingrained in the national character is faithfully portrayed in John Buncle the unitarian, with his dogmatism and utter intolerance, and his delight in wordy argument untempered by the slightest capacity for understanding his adversary's point of view.

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