study, and he became an excellent classical scholar. His first
ambition was to become a poet, and between 1804 and 1806 he
published two slender volumes of verse, which attracted little
or no attention. Yet Peacock was a poet of considerable merit,
his best work in this direction being scattered at random
throughout his novels. In 1812 he contracted a friendship with
Shelley, whose executor he became with Lord Byron. Peacock's
first novel, "Headlong Hall," appeared in 1816, and is
interesting not so much as a story pure and simple, but as a
study of the author's own temperament. His personalities are
seldom real live characters; they are, rather, mouthpieces
created for the purposes of discussion. Peacock died on
January 23, 1866.


_I.--The Philosophers_


The ambiguous light of a December morning, peeping through the windows
of the Holyhead mail, dispelled the soft visions of the four insides,
who had slept, or seemed to sleep, through the first seventy miles of
the road.

A lively remark that the day was none of the finest having elicited a
repartee of "quite the contrary," the various knotty points of
meteorology were successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice
being thus broken, in the course of conversation it appeared that all
four, though perfect strangers to each other, were actually bound to the
same point, namely, Headlong Hall, the seat of the ancient family of the
Headlongs, of the vale of Llanberris, in Carnarvonshire.