Download File

56
PEACOCK
appeal from the head to the heart, from the
certainty of the present to the mystery of the
past and the future, betray the descendant of
Shakespeare and Sterne. The very culture
that he inherited from a Graeco-Roman civi-
lization, his bookishness, his archaeology, his
conscious Paganism, would have looked queer
in an Athenian of the fifth century B.C. The
author of " Love and Age " was no Greek ;
but he was Greek enough to stand out
above his fellows, from whom he is most
his Athenian
honourably distinguished by
open-mindedness.
That Peacock cultivated prejudices is not
disputed ; for instance, he could not abide
tobacco-smoke, Lord Brougham, or the Great
Exhibition of 1851. But his prejudices were
as peculiar
to himself as were the principles of
Sir Thomas Browne. They were not the
prejudices of his age and state, neither were
they of the kind that is fatal to free thinking
and plain speaking. Unlike the popular
dogmas of the muscular Christians and their
rivals the muscular agnostics, his whims and
fancies were superficial and involved no
intellectual confusion. He compelled no one
to build on unproved hypotheses, nor would
he suffer himself to be compelled. Though
sceptical about progress and mistrustful of
democracy, to the end of his life he disliked