very well grounded there, and on leaving it he conducted his education
and his life at his own pleasure for many years. He published poems
before he was twenty, and he fell in love shortly after he was
twenty-two. The course of this love did not run smooth, and the lady,
marrying some one else, died shortly afterwards. She lived in Peacock's
memory till his death, sixty years later, which event is said to have
been heralded (in accordance with not the least poetical of the many
poetical superstitions of dreaming) by frequent visions of this shadowy
love of the past. Probably to distract himself, Peacock, who had
hitherto attempted no profession, accepted the rather unpromising post
of under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham on board ship. His mother,
in her widowhood, and he himself had lived much with his sailor
grandfather, and he was always fond of naval matters. But it is not
surprising to find that his occupation, though he kept it for something
like a year, was not to his taste. He gave it up in the spring of 1809,
and returned to leisure, poetry, and pedestrianism. The "Genius of the
Thames," a sufficiently remarkable poem, was the result of the two
latter fancies. A year later he went to Wales and met his future wife,
Jane Griffith, though he did not marry her for ten years more. He
returned frequently to the principality, and in 1812 made, at Nant
Gwillt, the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife Harriet. This was the
foundation of a well-known friendship, which has supplied by far the
most solid and trustworthy materials existing for the poet's biography.
It was Wales, too, that furnished the scene of his first and far from
worst novel _Headlong Hall_, which was published in 1816. From 1815 to
1819 Peacock lived at Marlow, where his intercourse with Shelley was
resumed, and where he produced not merely _Headlong Hall_ but
_Melincourt_ (the most unequal, notwithstanding many charming sketches,
of his works), the delightful _Nightmare Abbey_ (with a caricature, as
genius caricatures, of Shelley for the hero), and the long and
remarkable poem of "Rhododaphne."

During the whole of this long time, that is to say up to his
thirty-fourth year, with the exception of his year of secretaryship,
Peacock had been his own master. He now, in 1819, owed curtailment of
his liberty but considerable increase of fortune to a long-disused
practice on the part of the managers of public institutions, of which
Sir Henry Taylor