If it had been for _Lydia_, I should not have protested.
The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change.

Why Hazlitt compared _The Life of John Buncle_ (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes been doubted or passed over, is by no means small.

Its author, Thomas Amory (1691 ?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the _Memoirs of several Ladies_ (1755).

It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos.

The author represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a "Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell district which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland, "Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland.