mare Abbey," "Melincourt," "Maid Marian," "Crotchet Castle," and Gryll Grange are

more familiar by their names possibly than by their contents, and I am not certain they were ever very widely read. They are not for all tastes any more than are olives and caviare.

Thomas Love Peacock was born at Weymouth, in England, in 1785. He was almost entirely self-educated, having left school when he was thirteen. And yet he became exceptionally well-read in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French. His father died when he was three years old and he was brought up by his mother and maternal grandfather, Thomas Love, a retired naval officer, after whom he was named.

At the age of nineteen he went to London to write poetry and study in the British Museum. He seems to have never studied for a profession.

He was fond of solitary pedestrian tours and in one of his walks in Wales met the lady who subsequently became his wife, and on another occasion met the Shelleys-the poet and his first wife, Harriet. He and Shelley became warm and intimate friends, as Shelley's correspondence reveals. The character of Scythrop in Peacock's novel, Nightmare Abbey," is drawn from Shelley. The novel was written in 1818 and

Shelley read it in Italy and wrote to Peacock as follows:

I am delighted with "Nightmare Abbey." I think Scythrop a character admirably conceived and executed; and I know not how to praise sufficiently the lightness, chastity, and strength of the language of the whole. It perhaps exceeds all your works in this. The catastrophe is excellent.

To those who have not read the story it may be said that Scythrop is a youth possessed with the desire to reform the world. He falls in love with two women at the same time, is drawn toward one and then toward the other, loses both and is always a dreamer.

In a letter to Mrs. Gisborne, Shelley says of Peacock:

His fine wit

Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;
A strain too learned for a shallow age,

Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page,
Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,
Fold itself up for a serener clime

Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation.

Peacock's satire was, as a rule, not harsh. He hated stupidity, he hated vulgarity, and he hated a fool and bore, and he had no hesitation in saying

So.

His novels can hardly be called novels, but rather a series of fantastic and sarcastic conversations, with the slightest possible thread of a story running through them. He brings together a number of people who have knowledge, wit, learning, high spirits, love of music, pictures, books, and fond of good eating and drinking. Among them are enthusiasts and cranks on all sorts of subjects, religious, political, and social, and brilliant conversation abounds, containing a good deal of wisdom and not a little satire on the follies and foibles of well-known public characters, such as Shelley, Bryon, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Lord Brougham, Lord John Russell, Canning, Wordsworth and Southey.

In the novel just referred to, "Nightmare Abbey," we have, in addition to Scythrop, Mr. Cypress, who is Lord Byron, and Mr. Skioner, who is drawn from Coleridge. Mr. Cypress writes a poem which is a hit at Byron's style:

There is a fever of the spirit,

The brand of Cain's unresting doom,

Which in the lone dark souls that bear it

Glows like a lamp in Tullia's tomb;

Unlike that lamp, its subtile fire

Burns, blasts, consumes its cell, the heart,

Till one by one hope, joy, desire,

Like dreams of shadowy smoke depart.

When hope, love, life itself, are only

Dust-spectral memories-dead and cold,
The unfed fire burns bright and lonely,
Like that undying lamp of old;
And by that drear illumination,

Till time its clay-built home has rent,
Thought broods on feeling's desolation—
The soul is its own monument.

"Maid Marian" is the best known and most popular of Peacock's stories, for it is in a somewhat different vein from the others though it contains much delightful satire. The scene is laid in Sherwood Forest, in the time of Robin Hood, and its basis is the old delightful story that everybody reads and loves of Robin and his merry men.

"Crotchet Castle," the finest and best of all the novels, was written in 1831. The scene is a country house-a sort of" Liberty hall," where guests are assembled, each possessed with some particular crotchet. Rev. Dr. Folliott is the principal character and interlocutor, a stout Tory, full of good humor, a lover of paradox, a despiser of cant and shams, an incisive conversationalist, and a sort of cross between Dr. Johnson and Sydney Smith. I have always thought that Walter Savage Landor stood for this portrait.

The doctor takes particular delight in exposing

the fallacies of Mr. McQuedy (Lord Brougham), who is a great political economist, doctrinaire, and advocate of the diffusion of knowledge.

The women, Lady Clarinda and Susannah Touchang, are delightful, and the volume is as breezy and as full of wit, humor, and satire as can be. The drinking song first above quoted is in this novel.

In 1819 it was Peacock's good fortune to obtain a clerkship with the East Indian Company, in whose employ it will be remembered Charles Lamb also was. He retained this place, with occasional promotions, for thirty-four years, when he was retired on a pension as Lamb had been before him. He married shortly after his appointment, his labors were light, and he led a life of lettered ease until his death in 1866.

His charming story of " Gryll Grange" was written when he was seventy-five, and he was a contributor to Fraser's Magazine almost up to the time of his death.