Lyre and Lancet: A Story in Scenes

A series of comic scenes set largely in a country house and among its visitors, satirizing social pretension, literary vanity, and domestic mishaps. Episodic vignettes follow a touchily vain minor poet, a practical veterinary surgeon, aristocratic hosts, and a host of servants and guests as misunderstandings, social posturing, romantic twinges, and professional rivalries generate farcical complications. Sketches move between drawing-room conversation, servant-room commentary, and public gossip, tracing small humiliations and ironic reversals that build to a sequence of surprises which expose characters' foibles while keeping the tone light and observant.