Amory, Thomas - John Fyvie (essay date 1906)
John Fyvie (essay date 1906)
SOURCE: Some Literary Eccentrics, Archibald Constable and Company, 1906, pp. 1-34.
[In the following essay, Fyvie contends that the purpose of The Life of John Buncle, Esq. was to explicate Unitarian religious principles.]
In one of his Round Table essays, Hazlitt makes some highly eulogistic remarks on a book which is scarcely known, even by name, to the present generation of readers; and, not content with describing it as one of the most singular productions in our language (which without a doubt it really is), this brilliant but paradoxical critic assures us that 'John Buncle is the English Rabelais.' Both Buncle and Rebelais, he contends, were enemies of too much gravity; both had 'the insolence of health'; the business of both was to enjoy life; and, if the one indulged his spirit of sensuality in wine, in dried neats' tongues, in Bologna sausages and botargos, the other showed precisely the...
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