There are exceptions--the Dominie business in _Jacob Faithful_ is one--but they are exceptions.

Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to the humour of simple _charge_ or exaggeration.
The last name on our present list belongs to the class of "eccentric" novelists--the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly improper sense so much as in its true one.

Peacock never plays the Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the sincere aberrations of Amory.

But his work is out of the ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing.
It belongs to the tradition--if to any tradition at all--of Lucian and the Lucianists--especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony Hamilton.

It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally different.