who gave its name to Shelley's poem of "Alastor, or the Spirit of
Solitude," published in 1816. The "Spirit of Solitude" being
treated as a spirit of evil, Peacock suggested calling it
"Alastor," since the Greek [Greek text] means an evil genius.

Peacock's novels are unlike those of other men: they are the
genuine expressions of an original and independent mind. His
reading and his thinking ran together; there is free quotation,
free play of wit and satire, grace of invention too, but always
unconventional. The story is always pleasant, although always
secondary to the play of thought for which it gives occasion. He
quarrelled with verse, whimsically but in all seriousness, in an
article on "The Four Ages of Poetry," contributed in 1820 to a
short-lived journal, "Ollier's Literary Miscellany." The four ages
were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the golden, the Homeric;
the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself
lived. "A poet in our time," he said, "is a semi-barbarian in a
civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are
resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated
passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of
factitious sentiment; and can, therefore, serve only to ripen a
splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or
a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth." In another part of this essay
he says: "While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in
and accelerating the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing
in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of
dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of
the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poacher and cattle-stealers of the
ancient Border. Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates on the
shores of the Morea and among the Greek islands. Mr. Southey wades