He was no greater than they were; yet
somehow he seems to take up more space. He did not, in the ultimate
reckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather as
Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Age
without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his
dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere
polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round
interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic
swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real
touchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is always
turning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally in
a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was used
by the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor of
Victorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the
execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to a
bandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning and
the tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _Great
Expectations_.
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